Life gets longer but only for the educated

Mar 11 2008

New research has revealed that while life expectancy in the United States has risen in the last decades not everyone has benefited from the increased long levity.

Researchers from Harvard have found that those who benefit the most from this encouraging trend are people who received more education.

It appears that individuals who had more than 12 years of education have significantly longer life expectancy than those who never went beyond high school.

The researchers say between the 1980s and 2000, life expectancy increases occurred almost exclusively among high-education groups and during that 10-year span, the longevity gap between the well-educated and poorly-educated widened.

Lead author Ellen Meara, an assistant professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School, says while life expectancy for people with a high school degree or less did not change between 1990 and 2000, the better-educated gained more than 1.5 years over the same period.

Meara says a 25-year-old with a high school education in 1990 could expect to live another 50 years, or for about 75 years and a similarly educated 25-year-old in 2000, has the same expected life span.

However the better educated had an expected life span of 80 years in 1990, but by the year 2000 it had risen to 81.6.

The researchers believe the longer-levity in the more educated is because they have better access to both information about disease and medical advances.

Meara says more information has become available on how to live longer, healthier lives and there are now technologies to help people to quit smoking or lead a less sedentary lifestyle, and certain parts of the population have adopted this information.

David Cutler, dean for social sciences at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and co-author of the study says even though we like to think that everyone get healthier and everyone benefits, there appears to be a 'rising tide that only lifts half the boats'.

For the study the researchers combined death certificate data with census population estimates and data from the National Longitudinal Mortality Study.

They restricted their analyses to whites and non-Hispanic blacks and created two separate data sets, one covering 1981-1988, and the other 1990-2000.

It was found in both data sets that life expectancy rose for individuals who had more than 12 years of education while for those with 12 years or less, it peaked.

When the data was broken down by gender, the researchers found that women fared worse than men and less educated women, regardless of race, experienced a slight decline in life expectancy at age 25.

The researchers found overall in the groups studied, as of 2000, better educated at age 25 could expect to live to age 82, while the less educated could expect to live to age 75.

The researchers also found that much of the mortality gap was attributed to smoking related illnesses and just two diseases usually caused by smoking, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (which comprises chronic bronchitis and emphysema), account for 20 percent of growing mortality differences in the 1990s.

Many other illnesses like heart disease and other types of cancer, also count smoking as contributing factors.

The researchers say other data has shown that the less educated have not given up smoking to the same extent that those with more education have.

This research was funded by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute on Drug Abuse and is published in the March/April edition of the journal Health Affairs.