Bad news for education

My notes on Alzheimer’s disease are full of papers showing a protective effect of education on Alzheimer’s disease.  Unfortunately this isn’t so for the same reason that owning a yacht increases longevity.  Yachts are a marker for the really important variable wealth, with its beneficial effects on health care, nutrition etc. etc.  In a similar way education is a marker (imperfect though it is) for intelligence, and we now have the evidence to prove it.

The answer comes from Norway of all places and the fact that it had universal conscription of young males into military service [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. e2451017121 ’24 ]  All 207,814 men born from 1950 to 1959 went in and underwent cognitive testing on entry.  The results were divided into 7 levels of ability.  Some 1,521 were diagnosed with dementia between ages 60 and 69.

The lowest level of education was associated with an increased risk of dementia, making it similar to the many other papers I’ve read on the subject.

However, the effect of education on dementia risk essentially vanished when cognitive ability was taken into account.  At each level of cognitive function the presence or absence of more education made no difference in the risk of dementia.

People like to do things they’re good at, music, dance, athletics, learning things etc. etc.

So we’re licked before we start, our cognitive levels determining our risk of dementia, lower cognitive ability increasing the risk (and decreasing the likelihood of higher education) not the other way around.

We’ve all known very smart people who nonetheless succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease, in my case two classmates one of whom wrote 30 papers on drug development, the other who was a coauthor with Stephen Hawking.  But statistics are statistics and what we all thought was true — that education in some way prevents dementia, simply is not.

Sad.