Monday, April 26, 2010

More studies, longer life

I thought that this was a joke. After all, when a student stays in school longer, we’d already be teasing them as stockholders in the school, so they linger on.

That may not be the case nowadays.

There was a study done, and it was found that more studies is proportional to living longer.  

I know why, and this study confirms it.

Interested already? Read on…


To live longer, go back to school: study


Racial Differences in Life Expectancy Among Elderly African Americans and Whites: The Surprising Truth About Comparisons (Garland Studies on the Elderly in America)How to Live Healthy After 40, and Extend Your Life Expectancy: Change Your Food, Change Your LifeVital Statistics of the United States 2008: Births, Life Expectancy, Deaths, and Selected Health DataLife and Worklife ExpectanciesDiet, Life Expectancy, and Chronic Disease: Studies of Seventh-Day Adventists and Other VegetariansAging & Life Expectancy with Disability (The Forensic Series)WASHINGTON - If you have been contemplating going back to school to get a degree, this might convince you: a study by the Harvard School of Medicine has shown people with a better education live longer.

"Between the 1980s and 2000, life expectancy increases occurred nearly exclusively among high-education groups," the study said.

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, the study showed.

"A 25-year-old with a high school degree in 1990 could expect to live another 50 years, or for about 75 years," lead author Ellen Meara told AFP.

"Looking at a similarly educated 25-year-old in 2000, you have the same expected life span," said Meara, assistant professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School.

"For the better educated, you have an expected life span of 80 years in 1990, but it's 81.6 by the year 2000. So it's quite a big gain."

The reasons for such longevity appear to be that more educated people have better access to both information about disease and medical advances.

"Quite literally, why are the better educated living longer? They're less likely to die of diseases," said Meara.

"As information about how to live longer, healthier lives becomes available and technologies become available to help you do things like quit smoking or lead a less sedentary lifestyle, we have to some extent figured out successful ways to do this," Meara said.

"But we've only brought it to certain parts of the population."

Life expectancy grew across the board for all races and genders between 1990 and 2000, showed the study, which looked only at non-Hispanic blacks and whites to "limit the impact of immigration on estimates."

But, during that 10-year span, the longevity gap between the well-educated and poorly-educated widened.

A well educated white man lived, on average, 5.8 years longer than a white man with less education in 1990. By 2000, that difference had grown to 7.9 years.

Data for black men, and women of both races, showed similar tendencies, except in the cases of poorly educated black and white women, whose life expectancy went down by 0.9 years and 0.2 years over 10 years, due in large part to lung diseases.

"The 1980s and 1990s were periods of rapidly rising life expectancy, but the mortality declines that yielded these gains did not occur evenly by education group," the study says.

"The diseases contributing most to the growing education gap in mortality include diseases of the heart, lung and other cancers, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, all of which share tobacco use as a major risk factor," the study said.

"Beyond the differential change in smoking, there is the national trend toward increased obesity," it said.

"As with smoking, obesity is more common among the less-educated than among the better-educated. Further, recent research suggests that obesity might contribute to nearly as many deaths as tobacco does."

Meara said researchers also wanted to "remind people: if you hear that life-expectancy is lengthening and it's getting better, it's important to remember that isn't the case for everyone."

The researchers used census population estimates and death certificate data covering 1990 to 2000, and information from the National Longitudinal Mortality Study (NLMS), which included statistics spanning 1981 to 1998. - AFP/fa



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