Research Paper Volume 11, Issue 14 pp 4923—4942
The positive impacts of early-life education on cognition, leisure activity, and brain structure in healthy aging
- 1 State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P. R. China
- 2 BABRI Centre, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P. R. China
- 3 Teaching and Research Section, Graduate School, Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing, P. R. China
- 4 Institute of Basic Research in Clinical Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing, P. R. China
- 5 Banner Alzheimer's Institute, Phoenix, AZ 85006, USA
- 6 Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Received: March 12, 2019 Accepted: July 4, 2019 Published: July 17, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102088How to Cite
Copyright © 2019 Chen et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 3.0 License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Education in people’s early lives are positively related to their cognitive function, but its modulating effects on detailed cognition domains, its interaction with leisure activities and the associated brain changes have yet to be investigated. This report used data from 659 cognitively normal community dwelling elderly who completed neuropsychological tests, leisure activities measurement, and 78 of them underwent structural and diffusion MRI scans. We found that: (i) the highly educated elderly had a better cognitive functioning in multi-domains, higher frequencies of participation in knowledge-related leisure activities, and slower age-related reductions of executive function; (ii) the intellectual and social types of leisure activities mediated the association between education and multiple cognitive domains, including memory, language, attention and executive function; (iii) there was a significant age by education interaction on the gray matter volume of the anterior brain regions and white matter integrity; and (iv) the interaction between age and education affected cognition indirectly through white matter integrity analyzed using structural equation model. Overall, our results revealed that high education in early life served as a protective factor in aging that may help to postpone cognitive and brain reserve decline in cognitively normal aging.