If you were planning an early retirement you may want to think again. According to new research, delaying retirement can actually slow the rate of cognitive decline among older populations.
Why working longer can help your brain
Ladders recently covered a study that established a link between the kind of career one has (how stimulating) and their risk for developing cognitive decline later in life.
Now, researchers in the SSM – Population Health journal have found that the longer you stay, the better chance you have of fending off dementia.
This was found to be especially true of participants who were college-educated, though all subgroups involved in the study benefited from postponing retirement.
“We approach retirement and cognitive function from the perspective that they both come near the end of a long path of life,” explains study co-author Angelo Lorenti in a media release.
What age constitutes “late” retirement?
The information comes from researchers at The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science in Germany with help from data provided by the U.S. Health and Retirement Study.
All of the Americans involved were between the ages of 55 and 75 and all of them had worked in the labor market at some point between 1996 and 2014.
The authors began to identify cognitive benefits for older Americans who continued to work up until the age of 67.
The earliest a person can start receiving Social Security retirement benefits is age 62, though these benefits are for retirees younger than 65.
Participants from the new study who worked up until the age of 65 not only delayed markers relevant to the diagnoses of dementia-related illness like Alzheimer’s disease.
Irrespective of gender ethnic background, work history had a major influence on cognitive functioning.
“It begins with one’s social origins in ethnicity, gender, and early-life social and economic status goes on with educational and occupational attainment and health behaviors, and goes all the way up to more proximate factors such as partnership status and mental and physical health. All these kinds of factors accumulate and interact over a lifetime to affect both cognitive function and age at retirement.”
These findings also go a long way to repudiate myths about older populations in the workforce. Namely, that inevitable cognitive decline that affects these populations makes them impractical candidates.
How work improves cognition
The reasoning for the findings above are varied.
Sedentary lifestyles, which a postponed retirement would help reduce the likelihood of, are a contributing element of cognitive decline.
In a recent study, individuals who were exposed to prolonged sedentary behavior had a 30% higher risk of experiencing dementia compared to those who did not. The same report also linked sedentary behavior with less severe manifestations of cognitive impairment.
Working additionally provides our brains with the stimulation necessary to keep it sharp.
In a paper published in the British medical journal BMJ, researchers found that people with mentally stimulating jobs have a much lower risk of developing cognitive illness later in life than those who do not.
Mentally stimulating jobs are defined as ones that require workers to make decisions and exercise control, as opposed to taking orders.
The authors found that the probability of developing dementia for workers occupying mentally stimulating jobs was 4.8 in 10,000, compared to 7.3 per 10,000 for the low-mental-stimulation group. These results were consistent even after the authors adjusted for factors like age, sex, education, and lifestyle.
The social interactions that work provide have been linked with similar benefits to cognition. “Accumulating evidence suggests that both humans and mice have a higher risk of developing AD if they are lonely or living isolated,” the National Institutes of Health reports.
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