Postponing Retirement Might Help Ward Off Alzheimer’s Disease

A large scale study conducted in France reveals that people who tend to postpone their retirement by a few years were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease compared to those who retired from their jobs aged 60. The study was conducted by researchers at INSERM in France who surveyed more than 429,000 and found that the risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s reduced by 14 percent among people who continued to work up to 65 years of age compared to those who retired at 60. The researchers added that the risk of the disease continued to decline each additional year that a person worked beyond the average retirement age.

The Director of Science Initiatives at the Alzheimer's Association, Dean Hartley said that while the study helped provide a starting point on how Alzheimer’s can be avoided by delaying retirement, more research was necessary to identify why exactly this was so.

“What you understand from this observational research is that there's a correlation, but whether it's actually causative is unknown. More research will need to be done to physically identify what's actually changing in the brain as a result of delaying retirement”, he said.

Source-Medindia