People who work with mentally challenging tasks, like financial analysts, doctors and air traffic controllers, stay sharper mentally while working and after retirement, suggest results of the new study.
"Working in a job that involves a lot of thinking, analyzing, problem solving, creativity, and other complex mental processing is related to higher levels of cognitive functioning not only before retirement (while we are still working) but after retirement as well," lead author Gwenith G. Fisher, of Colorado State University, reports Newsmax Health.
To investigate, Fisher and her colleagues analyzed data from participants in the long-term Health and Retirement Study, a collaboration between the National Institute of Aging and the University of Michigan.
The current report is based on 4,182 adults who worked for pay in a specific job for at least 10 years and retired during the 18-year study period, from 1992 to 2010. These adults were 51 to 61 years of age when they entered the study.
The mental demands of their jobs were determined based on an analysis of the Occupational Information Network database, developed by the U.S. Department of Labor to assess various characteristics of different occupations and workers.
Consistent with the researchers' predictions, adults who worked in jobs with higher mental demands were more likely to exhibit better memory before retirement and a slower decline in memory post-retirement than those who worked in less mentally demanding occupations, Fisher and her colleagues report.
When they looked specifically at mental status, which was assessed by backwards counting ability and tests similar to those used to diagnose dementia, the investigators found that seniors in mentally challenging occupations again tended to have higher mental status at retirement and a slower decline afterward.
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