Neurology
Is the Educational Attainment of Adult Children Associated With Their Parents’ Risk of Incident Stroke? Michelle Caunca* Michelle Caunca Caunca Caunca Caunca Caunca Caunca Caunca Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
Adult children’s education is associated with several measures of better health among their parents. This association is hypothesized to operate via mechanisms such as financial support, navigating health systems, and modeling healthy behaviors. Evidence on the association of adult children’s education and parental stroke is limited, despite the public health importance of stroke. We followed 13,788 stroke-free HRS respondents from baseline (1994) through 2018 until incident stroke, mortality, study drop-out, or last observed visit (106,346 respondent-waves). Adult children’s educational attainment was estimated by the mean years of education across a respondent’s children aged ³25 years at baseline, modeled continuously and dichotomously (³13 years vs. <13 years). Stroke status was determined via self-report of physician diagnosis. We fit discrete time hazards models adjusted for the respondent’s baseline age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, childhood health and financial status, childhood rural residence, and parental and spousal education. The analytic sample had a mean age of 64 years (SD=8) and consisted of 60% women and 12% Black, 7% Hispanic, and 78% non-Hispanic white participants. Each 1-year increment in adult child educational attainment corresponded to an 8% lower stroke risk (OR [95% CI]: 0.92 [0.90, 0.95]). Participants whose children were at least college-educated had 27% lower stroke risk than did those whose children did not have a college education (OR [95% CI]: 0.73 [0.66, 0.81]). The association was larger with respect to sons’ educational attainment (vs. daughters’), among respondents with less than a college education, and among those identifying as either non-Hispanic White or Black (Figure). Overall, this evidence suggests that greater educational attainment among older adults’ children is protective against incident stroke for their parents. This research should be replicated in a setting with adjudicated stroke cases.
