A Surprising Secret to a Long Life: Stay in School

Excerpts from an article in The New York Times Jan.3 2007 written by Gina Kolata
James Smith, a health economist at the RAND Corporation, has heard a variety of hypotheses about what it takes to live a long life - money, lack of stress, a loving family, lots of friends. But he has been a skeptic.

He is venturing into one of the prevailing mysteries of aging, the persistent differences seen in the life spans of large groups. In every country, there is an average life span for the nation as a whole and there are average life spans for
different subsets, based on race, geography, education and even churchgoing.

The answers, he and others say, have been a surprise. The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race and
obliterates any effects of income.

Year after year, in study after study, says Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, education "keeps coming up."

And, health economists say, those factors that are popurlarly believed to be crucial - money and health insurance, for example, pale in comparison.

The New York Times nytimes.com The New Age

Technorati tags: health insurance, education, aging, life, live, country income