1 August 2003

Which university course is healthiest?

The subject you study at university determines how healthy you will be in the future, suggests new research published in the August Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Dr Peter McCarron and colleagues in Glasgow and Belfast followed up health records collected from male students at Glasgow University between 1948 and 1968. They discovered that those who studied science subjects "had substantially lower risk of mortality" than those in the arts faculty. Medics were the least likely to die young, despite being the heaviest smokers at university.

Which topics are linked to health risks?
Dr McCarron's research is the first to look at the associations between university courses and mortality. Among the results:

• Those who had studied arts subjects or law were the most likely to die young
• Divinity students had the lowest blood pressure
• Medical students were the heaviest smokers, followed by law students; Science students were the least likely to smoke
• Arts students were twice as likely as medical students to die of lung cancer, but half as likely to die from accident, suicide or violent means
• Medics were the most likely to die from alcohol-related deaths.

What it means for modern students
The authors point out that a medical or science degree is more likely than an arts degree to result in a permanent employment and good income, which could affect health in later life. Doctors smoked more than anyone else as students, but also "may have been particularly likely to quit". This would explain why the lawyers tended to die young, despite being likely to have affluent lifestyles - they smoked almost as heavily as the medics and kept on smoking. Modern health surveys suggest that today's medical students may have even better health prospects, since, arts and social science students are now the most likely to smoke.

The authors conclude: "during the period of over forty years after university entrance, doctors are at lower risk of death than their peers - some compensation, perhaps, for the reported unhappiness in their profession."

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