Our research has not found consistent health declines following retirement. This continuation project hypothesizes that maintenance of the quantity and quality of social supports reduces retirement stress so that anticipated health declines are averted. The stress and health literature tends to focus on global measures of stressful events, on mental health or on indices of physical health such as physician visits or self-reports, and consists primarily of cross-sectional designs. The dependent variable in this continuation project will be change in physical health. This will provide a more rigorous test of the support-health hypothesis than would the use of mental health measures which risk circularity in perception of support and perception of distress. The independent variable will be change in social supports from before to after the single stressful event f retirement. Social support will be measured by the Social Relationship Scale which provides a measure of the quantity and quality of supports. Our prospective design will be based on new data to be collected and on existing longitudinal data. Participants in the study, aged 55-74, will be drawn from the 1900 male volunteers of the Normative Aging Study, a longitudinal study of aging in initially healthy males conducted since 1963 at the VA Outpatient Clinic, Boston. New social support data will be collected in the first year of this 5-year project when participants (N=180) are still working and again through the next three years as participants pass from work to retirement. Pre- and post-retirement health data will be obtained from the medical examinations administered by the core Normative Aging Study project every three years. Existing data (N=489), collected prospectively between 1975-1981, are limited to social support questions on work and retirement answered when respondents were working and again after they retired. These existing pre- and post-retirement data cover a maximum span of up to six years into retirement. Data analyses will primarily employ regression analysis using residualized scores of change in social supports and change in health. The long-term objectives of this study are to understand conditions which promote the maintenance of health among retirees and thereby help guide programmatic or social interventions on behalf of older people. Such knowledge will help health practitioners identify patients who are at greater risk because of deficiencies in their social networks.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Aging (NIA)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01AG002287-07
Application #
3114386
Study Section
Epidemiology and Disease Control Subcommittee 3 (EDC)
Project Start
1979-09-29
Project End
1987-06-30
Budget Start
1986-02-01
Budget End
1987-06-30
Support Year
7
Fiscal Year
1986
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Hellenic College
Department
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
City
Brookline
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
02445
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Aldwin, Carolyn M; Jeong, Yu-Jin; Igarashi, Heidi et al. (2014) Do hassles mediate between life events and mortality in older men? Longitudinal findings from the VA Normative Aging Study. Exp Gerontol 59:74-80
Mehta, Amar J; Kloog, Itai; Zanobetti, Antonella et al. (2014) Associations between changes in city and address specific temperature and QT interval--the VA Normative Aging Study. PLoS One 9:e106258
Aldwin, Carolyn M; Jeong, Yu-Jin; Igarashi, Heidi et al. (2014) Do hassles and uplifts change with age? Longitudinal findings from the VA normative aging study. Psychol Aging 29:57-71
Mehta, Amar J; Zanobetti, Antonella; Koutrakis, Petros et al. (2014) Associations between short-term changes in air pollution and correlates of arterial stiffness: The Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study, 2007-2011. Am J Epidemiol 179:192-9
Kubzansky, Laura D; Koenen, Karestan C; Spiro 3rd, Avron et al. (2007) Prospective study of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and coronary heart disease in the Normative Aging Study. Arch Gen Psychiatry 64:109-16
Zhang, Jianping; Niaura, Raymond; Dyer, Joshua R et al. (2006) Hostility and urine norepinephrine interact to predict insulin resistance: the VA Normative Aging Study. Psychosom Med 68:718-26
Zhang, Jianping; Niaura, Raymond; Todaro, John F et al. (2005) Suppressed hostility predicted hypertension incidence among middle-aged men: the normative aging study. J Behav Med 28:443-54
Todaro, John F; Con, Andrea; Niaura, Raymond et al. (2005) Combined effect of the metabolic syndrome and hostility on the incidence of myocardial infarction (the Normative Aging Study). Am J Cardiol 96:221-6

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