A college degree may help you get a job, but new research reverses course on the theory that higher education might protect against dementia.
Dr. Robert Wilson and colleagues at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago studied nearly 3,000 older adults.
They found a person’s education level had little impact on when he or she started having memory problems in old age or how quickly those thinking skills deteriorated.
“I don’t want to say that education isn’t important. It does help, but it’s far from the whole story,” Wilson says.
The good news: entering the elderly years with a lifetime of scholarly knowledge means any cognitive decline would begin from a much higher level of brain function.
There are plenty of ways to exercise the mind, even if campus life is ancient history.
