Having at least some education beyond high school is associated with a decreased risk of dying from cancer, finds a new U.S. study. But the link may have more to do with standard of living than education per se.
The researchers found that death rates for all cancers combined, as well as for lung, colorectal, breast, and prostate cancers, were strongly associated with years of education.
In particular, those with 12 or fewer years of education had higher rates of cancer deaths than those with more than 12 years.
Jessica Albano of the American Cancer Society in Atlanta and colleagues used data collected from death certificates and the U.S. Bureau of the Census to examine the associations between education and cancer death rates. The data include 137,708 cancer deaths that occurred in 2001 among black and white men and women between the ages of 25 and 64.
The results are published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
At every level of education, the study found, cancer death rates were generally higher among U.S. blacks than among whites. Only among black and white men with zero to eight years of education were the death rates nearly identical.
The differences between black and white death rates likely relate to other factors that are more directly associated with cancer risks, such as tobacco use, and access to health care and cancer screening, the authors say.
"Higher cancer mortality among blacks compared with whites at similar levels of education likely reflects socioeconomic disparities in work, wealth, income, housing, overall standard of living, and access to medical care that are not fully captured by the single measure of [socioeconomic status] available for our analysis (i.e. years of education)," the authors write.
Relationships between the level of education and cancer death rate were weaker for women than for men. They were also weaker for black women compared to white women.
But a very strong relationship between years of education and prostate cancer was found for black men. At every level of education, death rates for black men were substantially higher than those for white men.
As well, white women with higher levels of education had lower breast cancer death rates than those with less education. That reverses the typical pattern that has found that more-educated women are more likely to develop and die of breast cancer, perhaps because of their tendency for delayed childbirth.
