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Retirement Harmful

Health2016-2-22By: Libby Znaimer

Here’s a piece of information that may inform your decisions around retirement. It may be bad for your health, according to a UK study out which finds that it has a detrimental impact on both mental and physical health.

The work published by the Institute of Economic Affairs , a think tank, found that retirement results in a “drastic decline in health” in the medium and long term, even though there is a small boost to health immediately after people stop working.

The study used data from 11 European countries and compared retired people with those who had continued working past retirement age. It found retirees were nearly 40 percent less likely to assess their own health as very good or excellent, they were 40 percent more likely to suffer from depression and 60 percent more likely to have at least one physical condition. The study authors say the effect was the same for men and women, and the chances of becoming ill appeared to increase the longer people were retired.

Bottom line: the researchers say people should work for longer for health as well as economic reasons, and there should be no such thing as a normal retirement age. They believe public policy should remove the financial incentives to retire at earlier ages. This comes as the British government is already planning to raise the state pension age.

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