Primary Submission Category: Mortality
Gendered Associations Between Education, Inflammation, and 4-Year Mortality
Authors: KJ Davidson-Turner Mateo Farina Mark Hayward
Presenting Author: KJ Davidson-Turner*
Studies have long established the importance of educational attainment on later life health (i.e. long arm of childhood literature). Higher levels of educational attainment are strongly tied to reduced risk of mortality, morbidity, disability, and cognitive functioning. Research has shown that benefits of education may not be as protective for mortality across gender, with it producing more benefits for men than women. More recently, chronic inflammation has been shown to be a high-risk predictor of health problems in later life. Chronic inflammation is thought to be responsive to social and environmental factors which can then lead to later life health consequences. Using the Health and Retirement Study, this paper examines if inflammation risk mediates the pathway between educational attainment and mortality and whether there is a gender difference in this association. Our preliminary results show that educational attainment is predictive of inflammation risk for both men and women and inflammation is more predictive of mortality for men than for women. Therefore, while educational attainment is predictive for inflammation, once you have high inflammatory risk, education is not protective. Further, gender differences in the pathway between education and mortality may be occurring in part through inflammatory pathways. We plan to include measures of biological aging as well as our current markers of inflammation.