A college education does not carry a guarantee of a good life or even of financial security. But the evidence is overwhelming that, for most people, education beyond high school is a prerequisite for a secure lifestyle, and significantly improves the probabilities of employment and a stable career with a positive earnings trajectory.
It also provides tools that help people live healthier and more satisfying lives, participate actively in civil society, and create opportunities for their children. Individuals with higher levels of education earn more and are more likely than others to be employed.
College-educated adults are more likely than others to receive health insurance and pension benefits from their employers. Adults with higher levels of education are more active citizens than others. A college education leads to healthier lifestyles, reducing health care costs.
Add to this another reason to finish college. A Norwegian study of over 70,000 cardiac patients found that the more education patients had, the less their risk of heart failure was. According to lead author Dr. Gerhard Sulo of the University of Bergen, heart failure is a serious complication of acute myocardial infarction and substantially increases the risk of death.
Previous research has shown that patients are more likely to die after a heart attack if they have a lower educational level, but information on the mechanisms involved was sparse. Since heart failure is the most important incident in the chain of events leading to death after a heart attack, the researchers hypothesized that it might contribute to the observed educational disparities in survival.
The study included patients aged 35 to 85 years who had been hospitalized with a first acute myocardial infarction (AMI) — heart attack — during 2001 to 2009 with no history of heart failure. Their education levels were obtained from the Norwegian National Education Database. Education was categorized as primary (up to 10 years of compulsory education), secondary (high school or vocational school), or tertiary education (college/university).
Heart failure was divided into two categories; early-onset (heart failure on admission or developing during hospitalization for the AMI) and late-onset (either a new hospitalization with heart failure or death due to heart failure after being discharged from the hospital).
Separate analyses were conducted for early and late-onset heart failure. Of the 70,506 patients included in the analyses, 17.7 percent were diagnosed with early-onset heart failure. Patients with secondary or tertiary education had 9 percent and 20 percent lower risk of heart failure compared to those with primary education, respectively.
When analyses were restricted to patients who had surgery to clear blocked arteries after their AMI, those with secondary or tertiary education had 16 percent and 33 percent lower risk of late-onset heart failure compared to those with primary education, respectively. The results were the same in both men and women.
One explanation for these results might be that patients with lower education levels tend to delay seeking medical care when heart attack symptoms occur, and they have poorer access to specialized care. Also, patients with lower education are less likely to be prescribed medication after a heart attack to prevent heart failure, and they are also less likely to take their medication, which may explain the increased risk of late-onset heart failure.
What this all means is that focused efforts are needed to ensure that heart attack patients with low education levels can get help early, have equal access to treatment, take their medications, and are encouraged to improve their lifestyles, which will hopefully help reduce the socioeconomic gap in the risk of heart failure following a heart attack.
