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PAPERS:
Shan P Tsai, Judy K Wendt, Robin P Donnelly, Geert de Jong, and Farah S Ahmed
Age at retirement and long term survival of an industrial population: prospective cohort study
BMJ 2005; 331: 995 [Abstract] [Full text]
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[Read Rapid Response] Early retirement in industrial environment, different reasons for different people
Yedidya Dotan   (7 November 2005)

Early retirement in industrial environment, different reasons for different people 7 November 2005
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Yedidya Dotan,
Student, MD PhD program
Tel Aviv Univ, Sackler Fac Med, Dept Physiol & Pharmacol, Tel Aviv, IL-69978 Israel

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Re: Early retirement in industrial environment, different reasons for different people

In their recent publication [1] Tsai et al concluded that early retirement is not associated with longevity, if at all it associated with shorter lifespan and increased morbidity. I believe that their analysis of the data is lacking in the statistical sense.

Although they relate to the reasons leading to early retirement such as the possibility that poor health drove to retirement and that low socioeconomic is associated with increased mortality. Last, it is stated they were unable to assess the reasons leading to early retirement. I believe that further data mining was in order, primarily cluster analysis. Furthermore, I assume that there are three major groups entering early retirement: (i) Those forced to retire because of medical conditions or those being fired and called early retirement, (ii) Those wishing retirement to escape work with no plan and work constitutes the majority of their lives and (iii) people planning for early retirement for some time. I hypothesize that group 1 will associated with increased mortality and morbidity, while group 3 will be associated with better survival rates.

I believe that basic cluster analysis like K-means can detect groups worthy of further follow-up by questioners and thus detect the difference between groups that may lead to the current dispute common in the literature on the subject of early retirement associated with longevity.

[1] Tsai SP, Wendt JK, Donnelly RP, de Jong G, Ahmed FS. BMJ 2005;bmj.

Competing interests: None declared