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Women's education affects lifespan

Yahoo News Today, 12:11 am

A woman's education influences how long she - and her partner - will live, researchers have said.

A study on 1.5 million people found a woman's level of education was more important than a man's when it came to the chance of him living a long life. But a man's social class and income seemed to have the most impact on a woman's chances of living longer - more than the impact of her own employment.

The research, from experts at Stockholm University, examined data from the 1990 Swedish Census on 1.5 million people aged 30 to 59 who were in employment. Information on causes of death, including from cancer and circulatory diseases like heart disease and stroke, was then examined for the following 13-year period.

Education was found to be "of great importance" through a direct influence on death rates as well as indirectly via occupation and income.

"Education may also have an indirect effect through its possible importance for choice of partner," the authors said.

They suggested that better educated women may be more aware of healthy diets and medical treatments, thereby influencing their partner's lifespan.

"Women traditionally take more responsibility for the home than men do, and, as a consequence, women's education might be more important for the family lifestyle - for example, in terms of food habits - than men's education.

"If highly educated women more easily understand the plethora of advice about healthy lifestyles, women's education could have a substantial influence on the health and mortality of the partner. Women with higher education may in addition (be able to) receive better medical treatment, which may also be true for men - and for partners of highly educated women."

The study was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. It said a man's income influenced death rates for both sexes "presumably since men stand for the major part of the family income and thus the material standard of the family."

The authors concluded: "For men, the wife's education is more important for the mortality risk than his own education when the man's social class is included in the model. For women, the husband's social class yields larger mortality differences than own occupational measures. Women's education and men's social class and income are particularly important for women's deaths from circulatory diseases."