Delaying Retirement Can Delay Dementia Written by Marilyn Marchione

The article “Delaying Retirement can Delay Dementia” written by Marilyn Marchione talks about a study conducted in France that suggested people who retire at a later age have a lower risk of developing dementia.  Dementia is a term generally used to describe any decline in mental ability; Memory loss, for example, is associated with Alzheimer's disease (the most common type of dementia). The study looked at retirement specifically because work tends to provide people with a social network and keeps them mentally challenged as well as physically active. 

The research was quantitative; it looked at 429,000 people who were on average seventy-four years of age and had been retired for about twelve years.  These people were mostly shopkeepers, bakers, or wood workers. The results of the study showed that nearly three percent of the people being studied had developed dementia. However, their risk of developing the disease had decreased significantly for each year that retirement had been postponed. It was concluded that a person who retired at the age of 65 had about a fifteen percent lower risk of developing dementia compared to someone who retired at the age of 60. Researchers noted that the risk of developing dementia decreased by 3.2 percent for each extra year of work the person had completed. In order to rule out the possibility that dementia itself led directly to early retirement, the researchers conducted analyses that got rid of those participants in the study who had developed Alzheimer’s or some other kind of dementia within five and ten years of retirement and the results held constant.

The article provides a couple of stories about senior-citizen workers who returned to work after retirement and ended up leading happy, active and dementia-free lives.  For example, June Springer was 90 years old when she was interviewed and still at that time continued to work as a full-time receptionist at a plumbing and heating company in Virginia.  June was unsurprised and actually agreed with the results of the study when they were presented to her. She believes that keeping busy is actually a really good thing for elder Americans. Another story focused on the parents of Heather Snyder, who according to Heather, were retired but busier than they had ever been during their younger, working days. She said that they were actually much more healthy because they were taking various classes and participating in activities that kept on challenging them mentally and, moreover, provided them with more and more social connections. The research does not indicate that is absolutely imperative to delay retirement, but instead suggest that the change from an active lifestyle to a passive one has a negative effect in prevention of dementia.