BACKGROUND: The ageing population has initiated a debate about a prolonged working life. There is an interest in finding the pre-retirement predictors of bridge employment and retirement decisions, but the understanding of the experiences of bridge employees is still limited.

OBJECTIVES: The aim was to describe the characteristics of the pensioners working for a staffing agency, their motivational aspects, work patterns and types of services they provided.

METHODS: This article analyses the results from a Swedish staffing agency's yearly co-worker questionnaire from December 2017. The response rate was 44% (N = 1741). The design is descriptive, with correlation analyses and construction of typical cases.

RESULTS: Most study participants were aged 65-74 years. Sixty-five percent were men, 66% were cohabitating/married, dominating education level was secondary school or higher education (79% ). Important incentives for working were the social context and to gain extra income. A majority of the respondents also stated that their work increased their overall well-being. Seventy-eight percent worked 25 hours per month or less, 37% wanted to work more, 3% wanted to work less. Private services dominated with 61% ; most common were gardening (43% ), trades (33%) and cleaning (31% ).

CONCLUSIONS: More men than women chose this form of work. While single women need to work out of economic necessity, men, to a larger extent, work for the social context and well-being. The highest work frequency in 2017 (14%) in the population was found for those who retired in 2015, i.e. two years after their retirement year. A majority indicated that the work they were doing was different from earlier in their working life.

Objectives: We constructed a functional biological age (fBioAge) indicator by using four functional variables: grip strength, forced expiratory lung volume, visual acuity, and hearing. Our aim was to compare how chronological age (ChronAge) and fBioAge are related to cognitive abilities in older adults.

Method: We used data from the Poverty and Health in Aging project, Bangladesh. Participants (N = 400) were 60+ years of age and diagnosed as nondemented. Examined cognitive abilities were four episodic memory measures (including recall and recognition), two verbal fluency indicators, two semantic knowledge, and two processing speed tasks.

Results: fBioAge accounted for cognitive variance beyond that explained by ChronAge also after controlling for medical diagnoses and blood markers.

Discussion: Compared with ChronAge, fBioAge was a stronger predictor of cognition during a broad part of the old adult span. fBioAge seems, in that respect, to have the potential to become a useful age indicator in future aging studies. 

BACKGROUND: The aim was to develop a functional aging index (FAI) that taps four body systems: sensory (vision and hearing), pulmonary, strength (grip strength), and movement/balance (gait speed) and to test the predictive value of FAI for entry into care and mortality.

METHOD: Growth curve models and cox regression models were applied to data from 1695 individuals from three Swedish longitudinal studies of aging. Participants were aged 45 to 93 at intake and data from up to 8 follow-up waves were available.

RESULTS: The rate of change in FAI was twice as fast after age 75 as before, women demonstrated higher mean FAI, but no sex differences in rates of change with chronological age were identified. FAI predicted entry into care and mortality, even when chronological age and a frailty index were included in the models. Hazard ratios indicated FAI was a more important predictor of entry into care for men than women; whereas it was a stronger predictor of mortality for men than women.

CONCLUSIONS: Measures of biological aging and functional aging differ in their predictive value for entry into care and mortality for men and women, suggesting that both are necessary for a complete picture of the aging process across genders.

A prolonged working life is crucial for sustaining social welfare and fiscal stability for countries facing ageing populations. The group of older adults is not homogeneous; however, differences within the group may affect the propensity to continue working and to participate in continuing education. The aim of this paper is to explore how participation in work and education vary with gender, age, and education level in a sample of older adults. The study was performed in Sweden, a context characterized by high female labour-market-participation rates and a high average retirement age. The participants were 232 members of four of the major senior citizens? organizations. We found no differences in participation in work and education based on gender. People older than 75 years were found to be as active as people 65?75 years old in education, but the older group worked less. There were positive associations between education level and participation in both work and education. Hence, this study implies that socio-economic inequalities along these dimensions are widened later in life. This highlights the importance of engaging workers with lower education levels in educational efforts throughout life. It also emphasizes the need for true lifelong learning in society.

This study described health factors of importance for everyday health, such as pain, tiredness, and sleeping problems, in a cross-national context. Data for persons 60+ years were obtained from the Poverty and Health in Aging study, Bangladesh, and the Swedish National Study on Aging and Care-Blekinge. The strongest associations with everyday health in Sweden were found for pain and tiredness, while in Bangladesh they were financial status, tiredness, and sleeping problems. As similarities were found regarding the associations of tiredness on everyday health, tiredness may be a universal predictor of everyday health in older adults irrespective of country context.

We used an alternate age variable, functional biological age (fBioAge), which was based on performance on functional body measures. The aim was to examine development of fBioAge across the adult life span, and to also examine potential gender differences and genetic and environmental influences on change with age. We used longitudinal data (n = 740; chronological age (ChronAge) range 45-85 at baseline) from the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging. The rate of increase in fBioAge was twice as fast after ChronAge 75 than before. fBioAge was higher in women than in men. fBioAge was fairly equally influenced by genetic and environmental factors. Whereas the rate of ChronAge cannot vary across time, gender, or individual, our analyses demonstrate that fBioAge does capture these within and between individual differences in aging, providing advantages for fBioAge in the study of aging effects.

Most research in cognitive aging is based on literate participants from high-income and Western populations. The extent to which findings generalize to low-income and illiterate populations is unknown. The main aim was to examine the structure of between-person differences in cognitive functions among elderly from rural Bangladesh. We used data from the Poverty and Health in Aging (PHA) project in Bangladesh. The participants (n = 452) were in the age range 60–92 years. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate the fit of a five-factor model (episodic recall, episodic recognition, verbal fluency, semantic knowledge, processing speed) and to examine whether the model generalized across age, sex, and literacy. This study demonstrates that an established model of cognition is valid also among older persons from rural Bangladesh. The model demonstrated strong (or scalar) invariance for age, and partial strong invariance for sex and literacy. Semantic knowledge and processing speed showed weak (or metric) sex invariance, and semantic knowledge demonstrated also sensitivity to illiteracy. In general, women performed poorer on all abilities. The structure of individual cognitive differences established in Western populations also fits a population in rural Bangladesh well. This is an important prerequisite for comparisons of cognitive functioning (e.g., declarative memory) across cultures. It is also worth noting that absolute sex differences in cognitive performance among rural elderly in Bangladesh differ from those usually found in Western samples.

OBJECTIVES: Both physical functioning and cognitive abilities are important for well-being, not least in old age. Grip strength is often considered an indicator of general vitality and, as such, may predict cognitive functioning. Few longitudinal studies have examined the relationship between grip strength and cognition, especially where specific cognitive abilities have been targeted.

METHOD: Participants (n = 708, age range: 40-86 years at baseline) came from the population-based longitudinal Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging. We used a longitudinal follow-up of 6 waves during 20 years. For the analyses, we used latent growth modeling, where latent growth trajectories were fitted to the cognitive traits (verbal ability, spatial ability, processing speed, and memory) or to the grip strength values and each, respectively, treated as time-varying covariates of the other trait.

RESULTS: Results supported a longitudinal influence of grip strength on changes in cognitive function. Grip strength performance was associated with change in the 4 cognitive abilities after age 65 years.

DISCUSSION: A rather stable connection was found between grip strength and cognitive abilities starting around 65 years of age. The starting period suggests that the association may be due to lifestyle changes, such as retirement, or to acceleration of the aging processes.