Not going to school as bad for health as smoking and drinking, study finds

Higher level of education reduces risk of early death, experts say

People who spend longer in education live longer, an international study has found. Chris Whiteoak / The National

Not attending school is as bad for long-term health as smoking and drinking alcohol, according to new research.

The largest study of its kind, published in The Lancet Public Health on Tuesday, found that people who reach higher levels of education live longer than others, and more years of schooling leads to better employment and higher income which, in turn, leads to better access to healthcare.

People who completed six years of primary school had a lower risk of death by an average of 13 per cent, compared to those with no schooling.

After finishing secondary school, the risk of dying was cut by nearly 25 per cent, while 18 years of education lowered the risk by 34 per cent.

Researchers found that not going to school at all is as bad for long-term health as consuming five or more alcoholic drinks or smoking 10 cigarettes every day for 10 years.

Closing the education gap means closing the mortality gap

Claire Henson,
researcher at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine

And the scientists said the benefit of 18 years of education could be compared to eating the ideal amount of vegetables daily, as opposed to not eating vegetables at all.

The study was led by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Centre for Global Health Inequalities Research and the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Investing for the future

“We need to increase social investments to enable access to better and more education around the globe to stop the persistent inequalities that are costing lives,” said Mirza Balaj, co-lead author and postdoctoral fellow at NTNU’s Department of Sociology and Political Science.

“More education leads to better employment and higher income, better access to healthcare, and helps us take care of our own health.

“Highly educated people also tend to develop a larger set of social and psychological resources that contribute to their health and the length of their lives.”

“Education is important in its own right, not just for its benefits on health, but now being able to quantify the magnitude of this benefit is a significant development,” said Dr Andreas Eikemo, co-author and head of Centre for Global Health Inequalities Research at NTNU.

While the benefits of education are greatest for young people, those older than 50 and even 70 years still benefit from its protective effects.

There was no significant difference in the impact education had between rich and poor countries.

“Closing the education gap means closing the mortality gap, and we need to interrupt the cycle of poverty and preventable deaths with the help of international commitment,” said Claire Henson, co-lead author and researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine.

“In order to reduce inequalities in mortality, it’s important to invest in areas that promote people’s opportunities to get an education.

“This can have a positive effect on population health in all countries.”

Researchers acknowledged the need for more studies from sub-Saharan nations and north Africa, where data is scarce.

“Our focus now should be on regions 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,” said Dr Emmanuela Gakidou, co-author and professor at the IHME.

The study, titled Effects of education on adult mortality: a global systematic review and meta-analysis, identified data from 59 countries and included over 10,000 data points collected from more than 600 published articles.

The researchers did not survey people but looked at existing studies from 1980 to 2023.

These studies were selected because they had information on all causes of mortality along with information about educational attainment (number of years of school). The researchers found 603 studies that met these criteria and it took 30 people three years to work through the possible studies.

Statistical analysis was carried out to assess the patterns that emerged with respect to the number of years of school and age of death.

The UAE was not part of the study but researchers found that the results applied globally.