By CHISATO MATSUMOTO/ Staff Writer
March 31, 2024 at 19:12 JST
The National Cancer Center in Tokyo (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Individuals with a low educational background are at higher risk of early death compared with those who got a university-level education, according to the first nationwide study of its kind in Japan.
The study found that premature death among those who got no further than a junior high school education was 40 percent higher compared with those who received university or higher education, and about 20 percent higher among senior high school graduates, the National Cancer Center said March 28.
Previous studies in Japan have found that people who had fewer formal education opportunities tend to smoke more and undergo cancer tests less often.
The research team said these health-associated behaviors are believed to be behind differences in mortality rates.
Researchers analyzed statistics on about 8 million people between the ages of 30 and 79 by linking the national population census and death records from the government’s vital statistics.
They estimated age-adjusted death rates, which are corrected for population distribution bias, for three categories: graduates of university or higher education, high school graduates and junior high school graduates.
By cause-specific death rates, differences between graduates of university or higher education and those with less education were particularly large for cerebral vascular diseases, lung cancer, ischemic heart diseases and gastric cancer, according to the study.
The research team said educational inequalities in mortality tend to be smaller than in the United States and Europe.
In the United States, for example, male death rates from cancer among high school graduates are about 2.3 times of those among graduates of university and higher education, compared with about 1.1 times in Japan.
Researchers said they believe Japan’s universal health insurance coverage and other factors contributed to smaller differences.
“We want to conduct studies on a larger scale and make recommendations to reduce health disparities,” said Hirokazu Tanaka, a researcher at the National Cancer Center’s Institute for Cancer Control and a member of the research team.
The team’s findings were published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
The article can be read at https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyae031.
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