During the past twenty or more years, I have listened to the complaints of high school students, their families, and the public. The same complaint: “Why do we need a liberal arts education?” The question goes much further than a liberal arts education because it states that children should learn a trade.
Recent events at one university in Colorado included eliminating language, arts, and other liberal arts classes.
Research studies conducted during the last twenty or more years consistently show the same results. There is a direct connection between the level of education and heart disease. The lower the level of education, the higher the risk for cardiovascular disease and death. Regardless of race, ethnicity, culture, or nation, these results.
From the American Heart Association, 2019.
Education level may predict the risk of dying for people with heart disease.
By American Heart Association News
“How long people stay in school may play a significant role in predicting how well those with coronary heart disease will fare.
Education level has influenced people’s risk of developing cardiovascular disease. The new study examines just how much of a factor it plays among people with established coronary artery disease due to a buildup of cholesterol and fatty plaque deposits in the heart’s arteries.
Researchers looked at 6,318 older adults in three Atlanta-based hospitals who underwent a procedure to diagnose and assess problems in coronary arteries. Each person completed questions about the highest level of education completed. Other demographic details and medical history followed for four years.
Among the study’s participants, 16% had received a graduate degree, 42% had finished college, 38% had completed high school, and 4% had completed elementary or middle school.
Researchers found that compared to people with graduate degrees, those with lower educational attainment appeared to have a higher risk of heart attack, dying from a cardiovascular event, and overall death.
People with elementary or middle school education had a 52% higher risk of dying from any cause during the study than someone who attained a graduate degree. People who completed high school had a 43% increased risk. College graduates had a 26% higher risk than people with graduate degrees.
The higher risk remained even after adjusting for traditional cardiovascular risk factors like diabetes, high blood pressure and tobacco use, and other demographic characteristics, including sex and income level.
“We adjusted for everything that would be a risk determinant, and despite all that, just the educational level was an independent predictor of outcome,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Arshed Quyyumi, a cardiology professor at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.
“What’s striking is how important the role of education is,” he said. “Most of us practitioners, we don’t ask patients for their educational level when we’re seeing them – and we don’t take any added precautions when you find that somebody may not be as well educated as another person.”
The findings were presented Tuesday at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Paris and published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Quyyumi said the results show a need for increased awareness among physicians to be more vigilant about following through with heart patients to make sure they’re taking medicine and making recommended lifestyle changes to lower risk. It also shows the link between a person’s health and social determinants, factors that influence where and how people live, learn, work and play.
Social determinants of health represent “a phenomenon outside of biology and genetics, outside of traditional risk factors,” said Dr. Clyde Yancy, professor and cardiology chief at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.”
Multiple studies done worldwide consistently show the same results.
The message is clear. Get an education!
Help is Available. Contact Dr. Schwartz at dransphd@aol.com