The Silver Lining of Working Post Retirement

Working after turning 65 has more than just financial benefits. A new British study found that working a few years post retirement may help ward off dementia.

WebMD‘s definition of dementia is as follows:

Dementia is a loss of mental skills that affects your daily life. It can cause problems with your memory and how well you can think and plan. Usually dementia gets worse over time. How long this takes is different for each person. Some people stay the same for years. Others lose skills quickly.

Your chances of having dementia rise as you get older. But this does not mean that everyone will get it. Many older adults never get it. By age 85, about 35 out of 100 people have it.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia.

The study, which looked at the lifestyle factors that may affect the age of onset of dementia, was conducted by scientists at King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry. Researchers analyzed data from patients with Alzheimer’s disease by looking at their education, employment and retirement. The scientists found no connection between education or employment and the age of onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Retirement age, on the other hand, had a significant effect on onset age of Alzheimers. According to the Institute of Psychiatry,

…for the 382 males in the study those who retired later tended to develop disease symptoms later. An extra year of work delayed the onset on average by 6 weeks.

More research is needed to access the reason behind these findings but it may be that the intellectual stimulation that older people gain from the work place prevents a decline in mental abilities keeping people above the threshold for dementia for longer. The possibility that a persons cognitive reserve can still be modified later in life adds weight to the “use it or lose it” concept where keeping active later in life has important health benefits including reducing dementia risk.

You can read the research article titled “Education, occupation, and retirement age effects on the age of onset of Alzheimer’s disease,” which appeared in the International Journal of Geratric Psychiatry in May of 2009.