Transition to retirement and risk of cardiovascular disease: Prospective analysis of the US health and retirement study

Transitioning from work to retirement could be either beneficial or harmful for health. We investigated the association between transition to retirement and risk of stroke and myocardial infarction (MI). We followed US Health and Retirement Study participants age 50+ working full-time for pay and free of major cardiovascular disease (n = 5422) in 1998 up to 10 years for transition to full retirement and self- or proxy-report of either stroke or MI (CVD; 665 events). We used discrete-time survival analysis to compare the CVD incidence for the fully retired versus the full-time working population. To distinguish short-term from long-term risks, we compared the association in the first year after retirement to estimates 2+ years after retirement.