Does Compulsory Schooling Interact with Genetic Predisposition to Impact Cognition? Evidence from the Elsa Study

Yan Liu , University of Oxford

Quasi-experimental methods in social and health sciences have been increasingly used to improve causal inference in the impact of social factors. This approach is beginning to be used to better identify gene-environment interactions with “exogenous” changes in the environment that are uncorrelated with family upbringing. This study investigates whether genetic makeup moderates the effects of education on cognition by exploiting the change in the minimum school leaving age from 14 to 15 from March 1947 in England. A fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD) was used to identify the causal effect of the policy-induced additional year of education change and how this interacts with the apolipoprotein E e4 allele carrier status. Data are from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Our findings suggest a possible gene-environment interaction between APOE4 and education on cognitive function in later life. For females, while APOE4 noncarriers are unaffected by educational attainment, APOE4 carriers are sensitive to the additional year of schooling. Female APOE4 carriers with the additional year of schooling have lower executive function scores that the less-educated female APOE4 carriers. Future work in this area needs to investigate the generalizability of the findings and increase understandings of the effects of social policies on cognitive function that precede disease arising from genetic background to inform new opportunities for effective intervention.

See paper

 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe