Genetics study suggests that education reduces risk of Alzheimer’s disease

The theory that education protects against Alzheimer’s disease has been given further weight by new research from the University of Cambridge, funded by the European Union. The study is published today in the BMJ.

Highly-educated people are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, a study claims.

According to the researchers, one possible explanation for this link is ‘cognitive reserve’, which refers to the ability to recruit and use alternative brain networks or structures not normally used in order to compensate for brain ageing. (Shutterstock)

Using genetic information, researchers from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden provided new evidence that higher educational attainment is strongly associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

If a gene with a specific impact on the risk factor is also associated with the disease, then this indicates that the risk factor is a cause of the disease.

The researchers used the Mendelian randomisation approach to assess whether education and different lifestyle and vascular risk factors are associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Mendelian randomisation is a method that uses genetic information to make causal inferences between potential risk factors and disease.

The analysis included more than 900 genetic variants previously shown to be associated with the risk factors.

Comparisons of these genetic variants among 17,000 patients with Alzheimer’s disease and 37,000 with healthy controls revealed a strong association for genetic variants that predict education.

“Our results provide the strongest evidence so far that higher educational attainment is associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Therefore, improving education may substantially decrease the number of people developing this devastating disease,” said Susanna C Larsson, from the Karolinska Institutet.

According to the researchers, one possible explanation for this link is ‘cognitive reserve’, which refers to the ability to recruit and use alternative brain networks or structures not normally used in order to compensate for brain ageing. The study was published in the journal BMJ.

“Evidence suggests that education helps improve brain networks and thus could increase this reserve,” said Larsson.

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