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Low Education Raises Dementia Risk, But You Can Keep Building Brain Resilience
Even if school ended decades ago, continuing to learn, stay active and connect with others may help protect your brain
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Key takeaways
- Lower educational attainment is one of the potentially modifiable risk factors for dementia identified by the 2024 Lancet Commission.
- Education may help build cognitive reserve, the brain’s ability to keep functioning despite age- or disease-related changes, but how much a person gets can also reflect socioeconomic and health disadvantages that affect dementia risk.
- You can’t change how much education you had when you were young, but choosing mentally engaging activities that you enjoy, staying socially connected and pursuing hobbies may support brain health later in life.
Maybe you didn’t finish high school. Maybe college wasn’t an option because you had to work or raise children, college was too expensive, or you served in the military after high school.
Whatever the reason, having less formal education has been linked with a higher risk of developing dementia later in life.
Less education is one of the many modifiable risk factors for dementia identified in a 2024 Lancet report. Together, those factors, which also include high blood pressure, hearing loss, smoking, physical inactivity and social isolation, are associated with an estimated 45 percent of dementia cases worldwide.
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But to call education a “modifiable” risk factor may seem a bit dubious. If you’re 50+, you can quit smoking or start treating high blood pressure, but you can’t go back and add more years of school to your early years. That doesn’t mean you’ve missed your chance to provide your brain with beneficial cognitive and intellectual stimulation.
Research suggests that experiences throughout life, not just years spent in a classroom, may contribute to the brain’s resilience. That means there are still plenty of opportunities throughout life to strengthen your cognitive reserve. You can’t rewrite your formal educational history, but you can keep learning.
Why education may protect the brain
One theory about why people with more education tend to have a lower risk for dementia points to cognitive reserve, which can help the brain continue to function well even after age- or disease-related changes have developed.
“Although two people can have the same amount of age-related brain change, some people can do better cognitively than others,” says Dr. Yaakov Stern, professor of neuropsychology at Columbia University in New York City.
Education is thought to be one way of building that reserve. Years spent learning may strengthen or expand brain networks that allow it to compensate even when the organ itself may be losing strength.
But people who have less formal education often share other things in common that could be detrimental to brain health. Someone who left school early, for example, may have grown up in poverty and, as a result, had limited access to health care and, as an adult, may be more likely to smoke or have poor cardiovascular and metabolic health.
“Low education could be a proxy for all of those,” Stern says.
That makes it difficult to say that education itself is the single protective ingredient.
“It’s not just cognitive reserve. It’s the combination of cognitive reserve and higher education and all the other stuff that goes along with it,” says Dr. Zaldy Tan, Medical Director, Jona Goldrich Center for Alzheimer’s and Memory Disorders at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.
You can keep challenging your brain
The encouraging part is that cognitive reserve isn’t necessarily something you finish building when school is out.
A 2024 review in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience evaluated 27 studies and found that higher cognitive reserves gained in early-, mid- and later-life were all protective against dementia. While early-life reserves were measured by schooling, the researchers looked at a range of experiences, such as job complexity and social connection, as markers of mid- and later-life reserves. Engaging your brain throughout life reaps ongoing benefits.
“It doesn’t have to be taking a class in nuclear physics,” Stern says. Activities could include socializing, playing games, pursuing hobbies or taking a course you feel you’d enjoy.
Here are some ways to put that into practice.
1. Learn something you actually care about.
Both Stern and Tan emphasize finding activities you’ll stick with rather than forcing yourself to do one supposedly perfect brain exercise.
“If you like to play bridge, that’s fantastic,” Stern says. “But if you’re not into that, you find what you’re interested in.”
It might be genealogy, photography, gardening, learning to use a new piece of technology or taking a local history class. The point is to engage your mind in something that will keep you interested.
And if you like computer- or phone-based brain training games, the ACTIVE trial found that people who completed 14 to 22 hours of computer-based training that challenges brain processing speed — not memory or other thinking skills — plus booster sessions had a lower risk of dementia 20 years down the road.
2. Stay curious.
“Try to be intellectually curious,” Tan says.
If something catches your attention, don’t just think, That’s interesting, and move on. Read about it. Watch a lecture. Ask somebody who knows more about it. Try it yourself.
“Try to seek out new information every day,” Tan says.
That could be as ambitious as learning an instrument or as ordinary as trying a new recipe.
And don’t let age convince you that learning something new is pointless.
“Too late for what? To be a concert pianist? Yes,” Tan says. “But it doesn’t mean that you cannot play the piano.”
3. Combine learning with other brain-healthy habits.
Activities that do more than one thing may give you more bang for your buck. Take a dance class and you’re learning steps, moving your body and mingling with people. Join a walking group and you get exercise and social connection. Volunteer somewhere that requires you to learn new tasks, and you add both purpose and intellectual engagement.
“The point is to try to be with people and try to do stuff that’s interesting,” Stern says.
The recent U.S. POINTER trial underscores the value of a lifestyle that includes a diversity of brain-healthy activities. More than 2,100 adults ages 60 to 79 who were at increased risk for cognitive decline participated in one of two programs involving physical activity, a healthy diet, cognitive and social engagement and cardiovascular health monitoring. After two years, cognition improved in both groups and improved somewhat more in people assigned to the more structured, intensive program. The trial wasn’t designed to show whether the program ultimately prevents dementia.
4. Don’t ignore your other risks.
If less education is part of your personal dementia risk, that’s even more reason to pay attention to factors you can address now, including blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, physical inactivity, hearing loss and social isolation.
Bear in mind, cognitive reserve isn’t a guarantee. Someone can do everything “right” and still develop dementia. If enough disease accumulates in the brain, Stern says, eventually “the pathology wins.”
Developing the disease doesn’t mean you failed to do enough crossword puzzles, take enough classes or exercise enough. But there is also no age at which you become too old to engage your brain.
Take the class. Learn the song. Join the club. Read about something you’ve always wondered about. Find a hobby that gets you excited, out of the house, and around other people.
The goal isn’t to make up for school you didn’t have decades ago. It’s to keep giving your brain something to work with now.
“The process,” Tan says, “counts as much as the destination or the end result.”
The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.
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