THE education saves lives regardless of age, gender, location and social and demographic background. This is according to a study published in the journal “The Lancet Public Health”.

As found, the risk of death is reduced by 2% with each additional year of education. This means that those who completed six years of primary school had an average 13% lower risk of death. After graduating from high school, the risk of death was reduced by almost 25%, while 18 years of education reduced the risk by 34%. The benefits of education are greatest for young people, but older adults over 50 or even over 70 still benefit from the protective effects of education.

The researchers they also compared the effects of education with other risk factors, such as a healthy diet, smoking, and excessive alcohol consumption, and found that the health outcomes were similar. Typical is the example that the benefit of 18 years of education can be compared to that of eating the ideal amount of vegetables. Not going to school at all is as bad for your health as drinking five or more alcoholic drinks a day or smoking ten cigarettes a day for ten years.

“Education is important in itself, not only for its benefits to healthbut now we can quantify the size of this benefit,” notes Terge Andreas Eikemo, one of the study’s authors and head of the Center for Global Health Inequalities Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

“The most education it leads to better employment and higher income, better access to health care and helps us take care of our health. Highly educated people also tend to develop a greater set of social and psychological resources that contribute to their health and lifespan,” explains Mirza Balai, co-lead author and postdoctoral fellow in the same university’s Department of Sociology and Political Science.

The research evaluated data from 59 countries and from more than 600 published articles. The researchers point out, however, that more research is needed in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan and northern Africa, where data are scarce. “Our focus should now be on areas of the world where we know access to schooling is low and where there is also limited research on education as a determinant of health,” says Emmanuela Gakidou, one of the authors. of the study and a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

*Photo credit: eurohealthnet.eu