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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

Yaojing Chen1,2, Chenlong Lv3, Xin Li1,2, Junying Zhang2,4, Kewei Chen5, Zhongwan Liu6, He Li2,4, Jialing Fan1,2, Ting Qin2, Liang Luo1, Zhanjun Zhang1,2
  • 1State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P. R. China
  • 2BABRI Centre, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P. R. China
  • 3Teaching and Research Section, Graduate School, Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing, P. R. China
  • 4Institute of Basic Research in Clinical Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing, P. R. China
  • 5Banner Alzheimer's Institute, Phoenix, AZ 85006, USA
  • 6Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
* Equal contribution.
Received: March 12, 2019Accepted: July 4, 2019Published: July 17, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102088

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.