Education is important when it comes to your health.
Obinna Ekwunife, assistant professor of medicine at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, discusses this with one affliction in mind.
Dr. Obinna Ekwunife is an Implementation Scientist and Health Economist, currently serving as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Population Health, Department of Medicine, at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo (UB). His research focuses on developing, testing, and implementing cost-effective strategies to improve the adoption of evidence-based interventions among adults with chronic diseases, with a particular emphasis on cardiometabolic disease prevention.
Why Education Matters for Heart and Metabolic Health
Prediabetes is a growing public health challenge. More than 96 million U.S. adults are living with prediabetes, and among older adults the prevalence is nearly one in two. This group is particularly vulnerable, because prediabetes is not just a precursor to diabetes, it also significantly increases the risk of cardiovascular complications like high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke. Despite this, we know far less about how social risk factors (education, financial strain, or lack of insurance) shape cardiometabolic health outcomes over time in this population. That gap is what motivated our study. We used data from the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative survey of older adults, and followed more than 5,000 participants with prediabetes from 2006 to 2016. Our goal was to examine how social and cardiovascular risk factors interact over time, and to identify which social risks most consistently predict worse cardiometabolic outcomes.
Of all the social risk factors we examined, limited education was the only one consistently associated with worse outcomes across three indicators: blood sugar control, blood pressure, and cholesterol. This finding stood out, even when we accounted for other risks like financial strain or lack of health insurance.
But what surprised us most in this analysis was how strongly education persisted as a predictor. We often think of financial strain or insurance status as the primary social risks, and indeed they are important. But education consistently showed up across every model we tested. That means we need to think broadly about how lifelong educational opportunities, health literacy programs, and even adult education initiatives can impact health trajectories in later life.
Our next step is to design and test strategies that address these social risks in real-world settings.
Read More:
[Aging] – Longitudinal relationship between social and CVD risk factors in older adults with prediabetes: the HRS 2006-2016
