Job instability or early retirement may age your brain by up to seven years, study finds

Men who cycled in and out of jobs over 16 years of adulthood scored on cognitive tests as if they had aged an extra seven years, and women who retired early or left the workforce for long stretches scored as if they had aged an extra six, according to a study of 2,418 Americans published Sept. 23, 2026, in Alzheimer’s & Dementia. The Health and Retirement Study data, tracked by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, also found that roughly three in ten participants had already developed measurable cognitive impairment or dementia by the time researchers ran a formal assessment.

Erika Beidelman, a postdoctoral research scientist at the Mailman School’s Butler Columbia Aging Center, led the analysis, which followed 1,470 women and 948 men from 1998 through 2014 before layering on a 2016 cognitive testing add-on to the federal Health and Retirement Study. The point of the design was to separate two things that usually get lumped together in casual conversation about work and aging: how secure a person feels in a job, and how continuously they actually stay employed.

Seven years for men who cycled through jobs

Men who moved repeatedly between employment, unemployment, and short-term work over the 16-year window carried a cognitive deficit equivalent to roughly seven years of aging compared with men who stayed continuously employed. Researchers reached that figure by scoring participants on the Health and Retirement Study’s Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol, a battery covering memory, orientation, and executive function that they then converted into an age-equivalent scale.

Beidelman and her co-authors — Xuexin Yu and Yuan Zhang at Columbia, Constance Beaufils at King’s College London, Rachel Donnelly at Vanderbilt, Mateo Farina at the University of Texas at Austin, and Amanda Sonnega and Lindsay Kobayashi at the University of Michigan — sorted participants into seven distinct combinations of labor-force status and self-reported job security rather than treating employment as a simple yes-or-no variable.

Six years of memory loss tied to early exits

Women who retired early or spent long periods entirely outside the labor force showed deficits equal to about six years of memory aging, a different pathway than the instability effect measured in men. The gender split was not incidental to the design; the researchers built separate trajectory groups for women and men because prior work using the same Health and Retirement Study cohort had found the sexes moved through employment and retirement on different timelines and for different reasons.

Insecurity alone, without an actual change in job status, did not carry the same weight. “Employment continuity, rather than subjective job security, may be the more protective factor for cognitive aging,” Beidelman said, describing a finding that separates the feeling of being at risk from actually losing or leaving work. A person who felt shaky in a stable job fared better, on average, than one who kept moving between jobs regardless of how secure any single position felt.

Nearly a third already showed impairment or dementia

By the time the cognitive assessment protocol was administered, about 30% of the women and 31% of the men in the study population met diagnostic criteria for mild cognitive impairment or dementia. That prevalence sits well above the roughly one-in-ten rate the National Institute on Aging cites for dementia alone among Americans 65 and older, though the Mailman cohort’s criteria combined dementia with the milder, earlier-stage classification of impairment, and participants entered the study under age 65.

The size of the gap is what the Butler Columbia Aging Center’s own writeup of the study highlighted: work history sorted people into distinct cognitive-outcome groups years before most of them reached typical retirement age, using a national sample rather than a single workplace or region.

A federal survey built for exactly this question

The underlying data comes from the Health and Retirement Study, a University of Michigan-run survey funded by the National Institute on Aging that has interviewed a rotating national sample of Americans over 50 every two years since 1992. Its scale — and its 2016 addition of a harmonized cognitive testing module shared across similar aging studies in other countries — is what let Beidelman’s team track both employment trajectories and cognitive scores in the same people over 16 years rather than relying on a single snapshot.

The full paper, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, frames employment continuity as a policy lever rather than a purely individual risk factor. Beidelman said policies that help people stay attached to the labor force, rather than policies aimed only at reducing the stress of insecure jobs, may do more to protect cognitive health as the population ages.

None of the co-authors’ institutions have announced a follow-up study, and the paper does not establish that changing someone’s employment pattern in midlife would reverse an existing cognitive trajectory — the analysis measures association across a national cohort, not a controlled intervention. What it does establish, using a specific and traceable data set, is that two of the most ordinary events in an American working life carried a measurable, years-long cognitive cost among people who lived through them for 16 years running.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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