Causal association of education attainment with aging and cardiac death: Evidence from Mendelian randomization analysis

It is challenging to conduct randomized controlled trials of educational attainment (EA) on aging and cardiac death due to the time, cost and ethical constraints involved. However, it has been suggested that EA may influence the onset of aging and cardiac death. Therefore, we used Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to explore the relationship of EA with aging and cardiac death. The summary-level data for exposure and outcome of individuals with European ancestry were obtained from publicly available genome-wide association studies. The principal analysis employed the random inverse-variance weighted (IVW) method. The MR-Egger intercept test was conducted to evaluate the possibility of pleiotropic effect. The heterogeneity of the selected single nucleotide polymorphisms was evaluated by the Cochran Q statistics. A leave-one-out method was applied for sensitivity analyses. Our results indicated that EA significantly reduced the risk of biological aging, frailty index (odds ratio OR IVW = 0.846, 95% confidence interval CI: 0.815–0.878; P = 2.23 × 10 −18 ), GrimAge acceleration (OR IVW = 0.523, 95% CI: 0.384–0.710; P = 3.37 × 10 −05 ), cardiac death (OR IVW = 0.997, 95% CI: 0.996–0.999; P = 1.28 × 10 −03 ) and increased telomere length (OR IVW = 1.043, 95% CI: 1.021–1.068; P = 8.73 × 10 −05 ). The sensitivity analysis confirmed the robustness of the MR findings. No heterogeneity was observed among the single nucleotide polymorphisms and no pleiotropic effect indicated from the results ( P >.05). Our study showed that education attainment has a negative association with the onset of biological aging and cardiac death. The provision of educational opportunities may contribute to the delay of the process of aging and the occurrence of cardiac death.