Low educational level is associated with cognitive impairment

Research associates the educational level with the higher or lower prevalence of mental deterioration in older people. Education should also be “a marker of health”, highlights the co-author and academic at the Faculty of Medicine of the UDP, Fanny Petermann-Rocha.

UDP communications.- A publication by the ELHOC-Chile Research Consortium identified that there could be a Relationship between the educational level that people reach and their prevalence of suffering later cognitive deterioration.

The article, titled “Association between educational level and suspicion of cognitive impairment in Chilean older people”evaluated the information of more than two thousand adults over 60 years of age in Chile, who participated in the latest available version of the National Health Survey (2016-2017).

The results showed that older people who reported fewer years of education were more likely to develop suspected cognitive impairmentthe risk being higher in women than in men.

The deputy director of ELHOC-Chile, Fanny Petermann-Rocha, highlights that these discoveries “confirm the relevance of education as a marker of health. In addition to the results presented by this study in relation to suspected cognitive impairment, it is important to emphasize that lower level of education has been associated with other adverse health outcomes both in cross-sectional studies such as ours, as well as in longitudinal studies”.

“This emphasizes the relevance of carrying out public strategies and policies that encourage permanence in basic and/or secondary education, even more considering that in the In 2022, close to 50,000 students dropped out of the school system”complements the academic UDP Faculty of Medicine.

To assess the association between the educational level (categorized as basic -less than 8 years-, intermediate -between 9 and 12 years- and higher -greater than 12 years of study-) with the suspicion of cognitive impairment, the Abbreviated Mini Mental instrument, which consists of 6 questions, with a maximum score of 19 points. A score less than 13 was considered suspicious of cognitive impairment.”, explains Petermann-Rocha.

The full investigation is available on the site of the latest issue Chilean Medical Journalwhere you can observe the work.

Source: UDP