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Governments need to increase the proportion of the population in work in most developed countries because of ageing populations. We investigated longitudinally how self-perceived health is affected by work and retirement in older workers.

We examined trajectories of self-rated health in 14 714 employees (11 581 [79%] men) from the French national gas and electricity company, the GAZEL cohort, for up to 7 years before and 7 years after retirement, with yearly measurements from 1989 to 2007. We analysed data by use of repeated-measures logistic regression with generalised estimating equations.

Overall, suboptimum health increased with age. However, between the year before retirement and the year after, the estimated prevalence of suboptimum health fell from 19·2% (95% CI 18·5–19·9) to 14·3% (13·7–14·9), corresponding to a gain in health of 8–10 years. We noted this …