Retirement Accelerates Drop of a Person's Verbal Memory Function, Study Reveals
While retirement frees people from daily job responsibilities, a new study has found that it contributes to the fast memory decline.
A major British study that monitored 3,400 retired civil servants has revealed that short-term memory declines after a person retires from work. The study was conducted by researchers from University College London and Kings College London and participated in by volunteers who underwent regular memory tests over a 30-year period spanning the final part of their careers and the early years of their retirement.
The regular memory tests included checks on verbal memory and the volunteers' ability to remember words and also tested the volunteers reasoning as well as their verbal fluency.
As the results of the study revealed, a retiree's verbal memory function, which naturally declines as a person ages, experiences an accelerated drop, or 38 percent faster than those who have not retired yet. Experts opine that this can be attributed to the fact that retirees lack regular mental stimulation, which accelerates memory loss and dementia.
For Professor Cary Cooper, an expert in organizational psychology at Manchester Business School, the recently released results of the study are only an affirmation of the adage saying, "If you don't use it, you lose it." Hence, he encourages retirees to actively use their memory so that they can avert or delay Dementia.
"It makes it more likely that dementia will set in earlier. We know the more cognitively active you are the more it offsets the risk of dementia. I'm not talking about doing Sudoku but doing something completely different from your job - so if you worked in the civil service all your life, why not go and help out in a hospital or teach? The most important thing is to interact with people," Cooper said.
Apart from keeping themselves mentally and physically active, experts also encourage retirees to maintain a healthy diet, drink alcohol in moderation, and stay away from smoking.
