To life, to life …

JERUSALEM - The Wall Street Journal reported the decisions you make now about your career and retirement could very likely affect your long-term health.  A long-term study of 1,000 men and women born in 1920 is shedding more light on just how much impact work and retirement can have on longevity.  The participants all joined the study at the age of 70 and have been followed for the past 14 years by geriatrics researchers from the Hadassah Hospital Mt. Scopus.  After crunching the data at the six-year and 12-year marks, and controlling for individuals' health at the beginning of the study, among other factors, researchers found it was work - whether a person kept working or retired – which was a major determinant if a person was still alive.  Among the 1,000 people studied, those who continued to work at the age of 70 and beyond were 2.5 times as likely to be alive at the age of 82 as those who had retired and weren't working at the beginning of the study, published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.  It showed people who are laid off very close to retirement age are nearly three times as likely to suffer a stroke.