Our results also showed that EduYears had protective effects against almost all the diseases (Fig. 6 and Supplementary Table 12). It showed protective effect against PVD (OR = 0.54), hypertensive diseases (OR = 0.62), T2D (OR = 0.64), dyslipidemia (OR = 0.71) and CVD (OR = 0.73) in the community data, and RA (OR = 0.44), AD (OR = 0.61) and CAD (OR = 0.63) in the case–control data. It also showed significant protective effect on disease count (OR = 0.74), suggesting that educational attainment is protective for general health outcomes. The protective effect of EduYears against AD is consistent with the observed association from epidemiological studies50. On the other hand, however, EduYears showed a strong risk effect on autism spectrum disorder (OR = 2.30) (Supplementary Note 6), which is not influenced by SNP outliers (Supplementary Fig. 17) and consistent with a positive estimate of genetic correlation (rg = 0.28, SE = 0.038) from a bivariate LD score regression analysis30.
