Little More Learning Might Not Save Your Aging Brain

November 6, 2024
Ernie Mundell HealthDay Reporter

In 1972, Britain bumped up the total school years mandated for its children from 15 to 16 years.

That created a "natural experiment": Would Britons who got that extra year of education fare any better, neurologically, as they aged?

Unfortunately, the answer is "no."

"This surprised us," said study co-author and brain researcher Nicholas Judd, from Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc) in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

"We know that education is beneficial, and we had expected education to provide protection against brain aging," he said in a medical center news release. "Aging shows up in all of our MRI measures, for instance we see a decline in total volume, surface area, cortical thickness and worse water diffusion in the brain. However, the extra year of education appears to have no effect here."

The findings were published Nov. 5 in the journal eLife.

Judd and Radboudumc co-researcher Rogier Kievit accessed the MRI brain scans of more than 30,000 adult Britons taken an average of 46 years after they attended school in the early 1970s.

Education has long been associated with brain resiliency, so it was assumed that the brains of people who went to school that extra year might differ in subtle ways from those who graduated before the new law was enacted. But Judd and Kievit saw no differences in various aspects of brain structure that they studied.

That doesn't rule out temporary neurological changes, however.

"Maybe education temporarily increases brain size, but it returns to normal later. After all, it has to fit in your head." Kievit said in a Radboudumc news release. "It could be like sports: if you train hard for a year at sixteen, you’ll see a positive effect on your muscles, but fifty years later, that effect is gone."

The researchers also say that an extra year of education might produce microscopic brain changes that wouldn't show up on MRI.

Still, the findings do cast some doubt on the notion that there's a direct link between education and the health of the aging brain.

"Our study shows that one should be cautious about assigning causation when only a correlation is observed," Kievet noted. "Although we also see correlations between education and the brain, we see no evidence of this in brain structure."

More information

Find out more about research on education and brain health at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

SOURCE: Radboud University Medical Center, news release, Nov. 5, 2024

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