The Project STAR Healthy Aging Experiment

The purpose of this grant is to obtain preliminary data to support a larger study that would recontact 11,240 participants of a successful multicenter randomized controlled trial of small class sizes called Project Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR). This future study would provide critically important information on whether changes to early childhood education can have positive impacts on healthy aging and risk factors for Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease Related Dementias (AD/ADRD). The original study, conducted between 1985-1989, produced higher rates of high school graduation, college attendance, earnings, home ownership, higher savings, and lower crime among treated participants relative to control participants. Because these are social determinants of health, we expect that it also improved participants’ health and aging and proximate risk factors for AD/ADRD. Project STAR therefore presents one potential solution to the vexing problem of declining health in the United States. Project STAR is unique not only because it experimentally tests the value of small class size on education, but also because it tests other measures of classroom quality, such as teacher experience. It therefore allows for two experiments in one. Our short-term objectives are to examine whether Project STAR reduced premature mortality for the treatment group relative to the control group and to assess the feasibility of recontacting the original cohort. Our long-term objective is to turn Project STAR into a living cohort to study the social determinants of healthy aging by collecting laboratory and survey data, including biological age, pace of aging and proximal risk factors for AD/ADRD. The aims of the study are: 1) to collect preliminary data for a future R01; 2) to determine whether small class sizes reduce premature mortality in mid-adulthood; and 3) to release a dataset linking Project STAR experimental data to prospective mortality records using NDI.