A 1972 school law had an unexpected effect on dementia 50 years later
Staying in school one extra year as a teenager appears to lower the chances of a dementia diagnosis later in life, and the benefit seemed strongest among people genetically predisposed to the disease.
A British school law from 1972, which raised the minimum school-leaving age from 15 to 16, may have had an unexpected impact on the prevalence of dementia decades later, according to a new study. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that additional years of schooling could lower the risk of developing dementia, even among individuals with a strong genetic predisposition to the condition.
The study, led by Silvia Helena Barcellos, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, examined data from the UK Biobank, a health study that recruited over 500,000 British adults between the ages of 40 and 69 between 2006 and 2010. By analyzing the national medical records of nearly 112,000 participants born just before and after the September 1, 1957, cutoff, the researchers were able to isolate the causal effect of education on dementia risk.
The study found that those who had to stay in school an additional year due to the 1972 law had a lower likelihood of developing dementia compared to those who were allowed to leave school earlier. This effect was particularly pronounced among individuals with a high genetic risk of dementia, suggesting that education may help counteract the impact of inherited vulnerabilities to the condition.
While previous research has suggested that formal education could potentially delay or prevent the onset of dementia, the authors note that observational studies have struggled to separate the actual impact of classroom instruction from confounding factors like childhood poverty, early-life health, or inherited traits. To address this limitation, the researchers used a natural experiment created by the 1972 schooling reform, which provided a clear and comparable group of individuals to study.
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that educational policies can play a role in modifying genetic vulnerabilities to neurodegenerative diseases, including dementia. With the global population aging and the number of people living with dementia projected to surpass 130 million by 2050, public health researchers are searching for modifiable life experiences that could delay or prevent the onset of the illness.
Dementia, an umbrella term for neurodegenerative conditions characterized by progressive declines in memory, reasoning, and the ability to perform everyday activities, is currently a major public health concern.
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