Being Fired Near Retirement Doubles Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke:
To fire someone just before they’re set to retire can be considered heartless for more reasons than you’d think. Involuntary job loss near retirement more than doubles the risk of heart attack and stroke, researchers at Yale School of Medicine report in a national study published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
“With longer follow-up and heart attack and stroke events, we were able to better assess the association between employment separation and the medical outcomes,” says Dr. William T. Gallo, the lead author of the study and associate research scientist in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale School of Medicine.
Starting with a sample of employed individuals, the researchers identified 582 workers who were either laid off or left jobless because of a business closing. The study compared their risk of heart attack and stroke to a group that included 3,719 workers who remained employed. In considering the effect of job loss, the researchers also took into account other risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity and depression.
“Job loss is associated with a range of stressful outcomes, including loss of pay and non-wage benefits, limited access to medical care, and severance of identification and work-based social support,” says Gallo. “Older individuals could be at increased risk for stress after being let go from work. We know that workers over 50 may have difficulty finding new positions, which frequently offer lower compensation than the pre-separation job did. This can obviously affect their later pension amount.”
