Posts tagged educational attainment
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Higher Education Associated With Better Recovery From Traumatic Brain Injury
Better-educated people appear to be significantly more likely to recover from a moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), suggesting that a brain’s “cognitive reserve” may play a role in helping people get back to their previous lives, new Johns Hopkins research shows.
The researchers, reporting in the journal Neurology, found that those with the equivalent of at least a college education are seven times more likely than those who didn’t finish high school to be disability-free one year after a TBI serious enough to warrant inpatient time in a hospital and rehabilitation facility.
The findings, while new among TBI investigators, mirror those in Alzheimer’s disease research, in which higher educational attainment — believed to be an indicator of a more active, or more effective, use of the brain’s “muscles” and therefore its cognitive reserve — has been linked to slower progression of dementia.
“After this type of brain injury, some patients experience lifelong disability, while others with very similar damage achieve a full recovery,” says study leader Eric B. Schneider, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Center for Surgical Trials and Outcomes Research. “Our work suggests that cognitive reserve ¬— the brain’s ability to be resilient in the face of insult or injury — could account for the difference.”
Schneider conducted the research in conjunction with Robert D. Stevens. M.D., a neuro-intensive care physician with Johns Hopkins’ Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine.
For the study, the researchers studied 769 patients enrolled in the TBI Model Systems database, an ongoing multi-center cohort of patients funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The patients had been hospitalized with a moderate to severe TBI and subsequently admitted to a rehabilitation facility.
Of the 769 patients, 219 — or 27.8 percent — were free of any detectable disability one year after their injury. Twenty-three patients who didn’t complete high school — 9.7 percent of those at that education level — recovered, while 136 patients with between 12 and 15 years of schooling — 30.8 percent of those at that educational level — did. Nearly 40 percent of patients — 76 of the 194 — who had 16 or more years of education fully recovered.
Schneider says researchers don’t currently understand the biological mechanisms that might account for the link between years of schooling and improved recovery.
“People with increased cognitive reserve capabilities may actually heal in a different way that allows them to return to their pre–injury function and/or they may be able to better adapt and form new pathways in their brains to compensate for the injury,” Schneider says. “Further studies are needed to not only find out, but also to use that knowledge to help people with less cognitive reserve.”
Meanwhile, he says, “What we learned may point to the potential value of continuing to educate yourself and engage in cognitively intensive activities. Just as we try to keep our bodies strong in order to help us recover when we are ill, we need to keep the brain in the best shape it can be.”
Adds Stevens: “Understanding the underpinnings of cognitive reserve in terms of brain biology could generate ideas on how to enhance recovery from brain injury.”
(Source: hopkinsmedicine.org)
Genes Contribute to How Long You Stay in School
There are a variety of factors that determine the number of years a person goes to school – personality, finances, life circumstances, country of origin and social norms. One factor that may be less obvious, however, is genetics. Around 40 percent of the variance in educational attainment can be explained by a person’s DNA, according to previous research. Now a new study is the first to identify specific genes that influence educational achievement.
This research falls under the category of social-science genetics, a topic that includes everything from genes for political affiliation to genes for criminality. Previous studies in the field, however, have found relatively weak associations between specific gene variants and behavior, since behavior is influenced by the accumulation of small effects from many genes.
To counteract that problem, this study was especially large – 125,000 Caucasian people from the United States, Australia, and 13 European countries. Researchers took blood samples and asked participants how many years of schooling they’d completed and whether or not they’d graduated from college. The researchers converted the answers to an international educational standard to allow accurate comparisons between countries.
Then, delving into subjects’ DNA, researchers found three mutations (called SNPs) at specific positions on the genome that were strongly associated with educational outcome – one that corresponded to years of schooling and two that corresponded to college completion. The mutations were found within genes believed to be associated with health, learning, memory and brain-cell mechanics, the researchers report today in Science.
Each mutation contributed only a small amount. In terms of the years of schooling, one copy of the SNP meant that an individual completed 1 month of additional schooling. (Each person can have up to two copies of an individual SNP, one from mom and one from dad.)
For college completion, the most indicative SNP corresponded to a 1.8 percentage-point rise in the likelihood of graduating from college. If a person had two copies of this SNP, then, their likelihood would rise by 3.6 points.
These are small effects but meaningful because they held up on such a large scale. The findings support the general consensus that our behavioral traits are influenced by a large number of genes, each of small effect. Overall, each SNP in this study altered educational attainment by only about 0.02%. In comparison, for a complex physical trait like human height, a single SNP can influence the outcome by 0.4%.
Ongoing genetic research keeps reinforcing this idea that genes aren’t destiny – there’s no gene for graduating college. But it’s good to keep in mind that genes are part of the list of contributors that make us who we are.