By RINTARO SAKURAI/ Staff Writer
July 4, 2023 at 08:00 JST
Kyoto University Hospital (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
An international study found that retirees are at a lower risk of developing heart disease than those who continue working.
Researchers from Kyoto University, Tokyo’s Waseda University and Harvard University surveyed more than 100,000 people aged 50 to 70 in 35 countries to assess the relationship between retirement and people’s health.
They integrated the results in each country and analyzed the findings.
This led to them reversing a commonly accepted theory, based on multiple reports, that retiring raises the risk of developing heart disease.
Koryu Sato, an assistant professor of social epidemiology at Kyoto University, who is a member of the team, says that he intuitively felt it was odd to think that continuing to work reduced the risk of heart disease.
The team followed the lives of 106,927 people in 35 countries--including those in Europe, the United States, Mexico, Japan, China and South Korea--for an average period of 6.7 years to understand the relationship between work, retirement and the risk of developing heart disease.
The team found that the risk of retirees developing heart disease was 2.2 percentage points lower than that of those who continue working.
If everyone in their 60s in Japan retired, the number of heart disease patients would drop by around 200,000, according to the team.
The team also found that the smoking rate among women dropped once they retired. This, the members said, could be because they were now free of work-related stress.
Governments in countries around the world, including Japan, have introduced policies such as raising pension ages or retirement ages, creating societies in which older people continue to work.
However, the team says that its research proved that delayed retirement is not necessarily good for the health.
The team also said it didn’t find any significant difference between countries in the results.
“For older people who work longer, it will be increasingly important to be conscious to have opportunities to exercise, especially if they are in desk-bound jobs,” Sato said.
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