Education can reduce health differences related to genetic risk of obesity
| Autor: | Patrick Turley, Silvia Helena Barcellos, Leandro S. Carvalho |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
0301 basic medicine
obesity Multifactorial Inheritance Natural experiment Secondary education Adolescent Social Determinants of Health Social Sciences Economic Sciences Body Mass Index 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Risk Factors Genetic predisposition Genetics Medicine Body Size Humans Genetic Predisposition to Disease Genetic risk Child Lung function Estimation education Multidisciplinary business.industry Infant Newborn Infant health Biological Sciences gene-by-environment medicine.disease Obesity Middle age 030104 developmental biology PNAS Plus Child Preschool Educational Status business 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Demography |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
| ISSN: | 1091-6490 0027-8424 |
| Popis: | Significance Educational policies may increase or decrease health differences, depending on whether they reinforce or counteract gene-related differences. We investigate whether one such policy affected health differently for people with different genetic backgrounds. We find that the additional education generated by the policy benefited those with higher genetic risk of obesity the most, reducing the gap in unhealthy body size between those in the top and bottom terciles of genetic risk of obesity from 20 to 6 percentage points. Our results challenge the notion of genetic determinism and underscore the role that social policy can have in mitigating possible health differences arising from genetic background. This work investigates whether genetic makeup moderates the effects of education on health. Low statistical power and endogenous measures of environment have been obstacles to the credible estimation of such gene-by-environment interactions. We overcome these obstacles by combining a natural experiment that generated variation in secondary education with polygenic scores for a quarter-million individuals. The additional schooling affected body size, lung function, and blood pressure in middle age. The improvements in body size and lung function were larger for individuals with high genetic predisposition to obesity. As a result, education reduced the gap in unhealthy body size between those in the top and bottom terciles of genetic risk of obesity from 20 to 6 percentage points. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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