Higher education linked to lower risk of Alzheimer’s in gene study

Higher educational attainment is associated with a "significantly lower" chance of people suffering Alzheimer's, according to the biggest genetic study into the potential causes of the disease reported today in the BMJ. The researchers believe education could combat the risk of Alzheimer's by building "cognitive reserve", where a brain is stronger to counter neurological damage from the disease, and by increasing the chances that people follow a healthier lifestyle. The research was led by Dr Susanna C Larsson, who has moved to Cambridge University from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and is published alongside a commentary in the BMJ by Gill Livingston, Professor of Psychiatry of Older People at UCL, and Dr Andrew Sommerlad, Clinical Training Fellow in UCL's Division of Psychiatry. Conventional observational studies have shown low educational attainment is associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer's with potentially 19% of cases linked to it. In the new BMJ study, however, the researchers used data from gene studies of up to about 405,000 individuals to test the thesis for 24 different factors ranging from education to diet, lifestyle, health and inflammatory factors. The project included 17,008 cases of Alzheimer's disease with associated controls of a further 37,154 people. "Genetically predicted higher educational attainment was associated with significantly lower odds of Alzheimer's disease," report Larsson and her colleagues, who used a technique known as Mendelian randomisation (MR) to assess the causal inferences from genetic variants.