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Increasing educational attainment and mortality reduction: a systematic review and taxonomy
Elena Byhoff1, Mary C Hamati2, Robyn Power2
1Department of Medicine, Tufts Medical Center, Tufts University School of Medicine, 800 Washington St Box #63, Boston, MA, 02111, USA. ebyhoff@tuftsmedicalcenter.org.
BMC Public Health
|September 20, 2017
Summary
Higher educational attainment is linked to reduced mortality. This review proposes a new taxonomy to better understand the education-mortality relationship, aiding public health policy.
Area of Science:
- Public Health
- Sociology
- Epidemiology
Background:
- The association between educational attainment and mortality reduction has significant public health implications.
- Existing literature requires a structured approach for comprehensive evaluation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To establish a taxonomy for evaluating the relationship between educational attainment and early mortality.
- To organize and synthesize existing research on education and mortality.
Main Methods:
- Systematic literature review following PRISMA guidelines.
- Searches conducted in Ovid Medline, Embase, PubMed, and reference lists.
- Inclusion of English-language primary data analyses with education as an independent variable and mortality as a dependent variable.
Main Results:
- 262 eligible studies were included after screening 418 manuscripts from 1,711 unique articles.
- The literature was categorized into four domains: all-cause mortality, outcome-specific mortality, explanatory pathways, and trends over time.
- This categorization forms a novel taxonomy to quantify the education-mortality association.
Conclusions:
- A proposed organizational taxonomy aids in a deeper understanding of the education-mortality link.
- Mediators and subgroups partially explain the relationship between education and early mortality, but do not account for the entire association.
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