Washington, Feb 28 (IANS) Your granny was right after all in insisting that being attentive and studying hard at school and college helped you live longer, besides fending off risks of cardiovascular disease.
Education is now also being correlated with lower blood pressure (BP), decrease in alcohol consumption, smoking and weight gain, according to latest research.
Researchers followed 3,890 people for 30 years from the Framingham Offspring Study, regarding their education levels, status of heart disease, the journal BMC Public Health reports.
Eric Loucks from Brown University department of community health, who led the study said: ‘Even when adjusted for socio-economic variables, education is inversely correlated with high blood pressure…’
Educated men (with more than 17 years of education) had a lower body mass index (BMI), a height to weight ratio, smoked less and drank less than men with less education, according to a Brown University statement.
Similarly, educated women also smoked less, had lower BMI, but drank more than their less educated sisters (however, they still drank about half as much as the educated men).
For both men and women, each extra level of academic study completed further reduced the incidence of high blood pressure.
