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Perk of Complex Job: Aging Mind Is Sharp
Having a complex job may slow age-related mental
decline
By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Medical News
Mentally demanding jobs come with a hidden benefit:
less mental decline with age.
Work
that requires decision making, negotiating with
others, analysis, and making judgments may not
necessarily pad your bank account. But it does build
up your "cognitive reserve" -- a level of mental
function that helps you avoid or compensate for
age-related mental decline.
"Jobs that have elements where you need to solve
problems, plan and organize, and think flexibly and
on your feet appear to carry cognitive benefits
throughout your life. You can potentially draw on
them later as reserves," Duke University
psychologist Guy G. Potter, PhD, tells WebMD.
Potter and colleagues studied 1,036 World War II
veterans who agreed to take mental-status tests
every three or four years beginning in 1990. More
than half of the 70-ish men were twin pairs included
in the ongoing Duke Twin Study of Memory in Aging.
Earlier work with the twins suggested that the twin
who had the more complex job had a lower risk of
age-related dementia. That led to the current study,
funded by the National Institute on Aging and the
Alzheimer's Association.
In
their expanded study, Potter and colleagues took
advantage of the fact that the men had taken an IQ
test when they entered the Armed Services. This
allowed them to compare the mental function of men
with equal intelligence, but who'd worked at jobs
that demanded different levels of complexity.
"You
may say those who did not get dementia were smarter
to start with, or that those with higher complexity
jobs got them because they were smarter to start
with," Potter says. "We wanted to know whether it
was the intelligence they were born with that gave
them a golden ticket to aging, or something else."
After taking into account both intelligence and
education, Potter and colleagues found that men with
more complex jobs -- in terms of general
intellectual demands and human interaction and
communication -- performed significantly better on
tests of mental function.
Strikingly, this effect was stronger for men who,
earlier in life, scored in the low/average range on
intelligence tests. For men with high IQ scores
early in life, job complexity had only a small
effect on later mental function.
"People who may have had less of an intellectual
gift, or who may have been socially disadvantaged,
got something more out of having complex jobs,"
Potter says. "So maybe you can ride an intellectual
gift further if you have it early in life, whereas
those who don't have those gifts may gain them later
in life."
Men
whose jobs required mostly physical activity scored
somewhat lower on mental function tests, but Potter
discounts the significance of this finding.
"What I don't want is for people to look at the
manual-labor finding and worry that if they have a
noncomplex job, it is not beneficial. The physical
aspect of work has some benefits as well," he says.
"The balance you need is between physical and mental
effort in work and in leisure. Some manual jobs have
benefits in their own right."
And,
Potter warns, not all complex jobs are healthful.
"Complex jobs are stressful jobs," he says. "That is
something we'll be working on, trying to parse out
the complex jobs that give a sense of accomplishment
and the complex jobs that give you a lot of stress.
Not all complex jobs are beneficial, and we hope to
work that out somewhere down the line."
Potter and colleagues report their findings in the
May issue of the journal Neurology
©
WebMD. All rights reserved.
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"People who may have had less of an intellectual
gift, or who may have been socially
disadvantaged, got something more out of having
complex jobs." |
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