Eating well, exercising and attending regular doctor appointments can support a long healthy life, but a new study identified one possible factor beyond our control: whether you had a grandparent who went to college. The study, from researchers at Drexel University and colleagues from the University of California and the University of North Carolina, was recently published in the journal Social Science and Medicine.
    • §ɦṛɛɗɗịɛ ßịⱺ𝔩ⱺɠịᵴŧ@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      Ya, they should have worded the title more accurately. It’s a reference to your biological age, which is the age of your cells/tissues/organs. You have a variation of biological ages across your different cells/tissues/organs. This makes it pretty wild the education of your grandparents would have any impact on it!

  • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    I can’t help but to read this as “guess the omitted variable”. There’s just no way of controlling for everything that might explain this, and it’s obviously not the grandparents’ time in educational institutions in itself that does the trick.

    Thankfully, one of the authors summarized it well:

    This opens up a myriad of possible explanations and will need to be replicated.

    It’s easy to imagine ways this effect makes perfect sense, especially if it’s small. So the question kind of becomes what they have managed to successfully control for.