Retirement Brings Most a Big Health Boost
Medicine.net, November 9th, 2009
The self-reported health of the newly retired improves so much that
most feel eight years younger, a new European study suggests.
This happy news was true of most everyone except a small minority --
only 2% -- who had experienced "ideal" conditions in their working
life, anyway.
"The results really say three things: That work
puts an extra burden on the health of older workers, that the effects
of this extra burden are largely relieved by retirement and, finally,
that both the extra burden and the relief are larger when working
conditions are poor," said Hugo Westerlund, lead author of a study
published online Nov. 9 in The Lancet. "This indicates that
there is a need to provide opportunities for older workers to decrease
the demands in their work out of concern for their health and
well-being."
But of course, added Westerlund, who is head of
epidemiology at the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University
in Sweden, "not all older workers suffer from poor perceived health.
Many are indeed eminently healthy and fit for work. But sooner or
later, everyone has to slow down because of old age catching up."
Last week, the same group of researchers reported that workers slept better after retirement than before. "Sleep
improves at retirement, which suggests that sleeping could be a
mediator between work and perception of poor health," Westerlund said.
This
study looked at what the same 15,000 French workers, most of them men,
had to say about their own health up to seven years pre-retirement and
up to seven years post-retirement.
As participants got closer
to retirement age, their perception of their own health declined, but
went up again during the first year of retirement.
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