No effect of additional education on long-term brain structure, a preregistered natural experiment in thousands of individuals.

ABSTRACT: Education is related to a wide variety of beneficial health, behavioral, and societal outcomes. However, whether education causes long-term structural changes in the brain remains unclear. A pressing challenge is that individuals self-select into continued education, thereby introducing a wide variety of environmental and genetic confounders. Fortunately, natural experiments allow us to isolate the causal impact of increased education from individual (and societal) characteristics. Here, we exploit a policy change in the UK (the 1972 ROSLA act) that increased the amount of mandatory schooling from 15 to 16 years of age to study the impact of education on long-term structural brain outcomes in the UK Biobank. Using regression discontinuity (RD) - a causal inference method - we find no evide

SUBMITTER: Judd N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12296260 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature