MEDICAL MATTERS:More people may now have to work for longer, writes MUIRIS HOUSTON
WITH THE economy on the ropes and people living longer, the numbers who can contemplate early retirement are shrinking rapidly. The gap between the traditional retirement age and life expectancy is now more than 13 years – a big increase from 50 years ago.
Extending working life is moving from a societal choice to one of necessity. However, it has been an increasingly popular option over the past 10 years or so. Retirement is a major life transition that changes daily routines, alters social relationships and changes income. But is retirement good or bad for your health?
Several studies have shown that retirement at a younger age has adverse effects on health. One study in a petrochemical company showed that workers who retired aged 55 had a 37 per cent higher mortality than those who retired at 65. A similar result was seen in Swedish construction workers, although a more detailed analysis showed that their increased mortality was linked to poor health before early retirement. It can be difficult to disentangle the effects of ill health induced by early retirement from those due to voluntary resignation or forced unemployment.
Recent research involving 11,000 male and 3,000 female workers of the national gas and electricity company in France has helped tease out some of these effects.
Prof Hugo Westerlund of the Stress Research Institute of Stockholm University and colleagues assessed the association between retirement and the subsequent risk of chronic diseases, depressive symptoms and fatigue. The difference between this research and previous studies is that annual health assessments were carried out for a number of years before retirement as well as after giving up work.
The good news is that the prevalence of mental and physical fatigue decreased significantly one year after retirement compared with one year before retirement and this effect was even more pronounced in workers with a chronic disease. Researchers also found a reduction in symptoms of depression suggesting that for some, at least, retirement comes as a relief from the daily grind.
Work-related fatigue is common in the workforce. In a European survey on working conditions in 2005, about 23 per cent of all workers reported fatigue as a health problem related to work. Fatigue may become chronic when the period needed for recovery is longer than regular time off. The need for recovery increases up to 55 years of age but decreases in workers in the highest age groups. This may be because older workers are moved from more strenuous jobs to less physically demanding ones as they near retirement. Or it may reflect a better work-life balance as people mellow into old age. And it must be pointed out that the French utility workers usually retire at 55 under particularly generous State benefits.
But there was no benefit seen for the French workers in terms of chronic diseases. Researchers found no change in the trends for self-reported coronary heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and diabetes linked to retirement: although, as expected, the prevalence of these diseases gradually increased with age. These findings suggest that early retirement does not directly affect the risk of developing a major chronic disease.
We need to be concerned about the current European drive to increase retirement age across the board. There is evidence that most people with low educational status will have serious health problems before they reach 65, while more highly educated people can enjoy their retirement in good health for some years at least.
It suggests that early retirement can be an important opportunity for many workers younger than 65 to leave employment when their physical or mental ability to work is impaired. Eliminating this possibility could have major social and medical implications for a large proportion of our workforce.
As Samuel Johnson said: “No man is obliged to do as much as he can do; a man is to have part of his life to himself.”