United States: In 1972, Britain raised the aggregate number of years that children are expected to spend in school from 15 to 16 years, as reported by HealthDay.
That created a “natural experiment”: Would those Britons who received an additional year of education perform differently neurologically as they grew old?
The answer, unfortunately, is “no.”
Study Surprises Researchers on Brain Aging
“All of this came as a surprise,” commented study co-author and brains scientist Nicholas Judd from the Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc), 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.”
Judd and Radboudumc co-researcher Rogier Kievit received MRI brain scans of more than 30,000 grown-up Britons, two from school in the mid-1970s and a median of 46 years of recognition.
Education has always been linked with brain hardness, and therefore, it hypothesized that the brains of people who went to school that extra year must be in some way different from the brains of people who passed through school before the new law passed. However, there were no differences whatsoever in different aspects of the brain structure, which were observed by Judd and Kievit.
They pointed out that, nevertheless, it would not eliminate Temporary Changes in Neurological Conditions.
Temporary Changes vs. Long-Term Impact
“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 explain that an additional year of education may cause brain changes that cannot be seen on an MRI scan.
Challenging Assumptions
However, these results raise some questions on the assumption that education is a protective factor for the elderly’s brain health, as reported by HealthDay.
“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.”
