The Relationship between Diabetes and Retirement from Work: A Ten-Year Follow-Up in National Registers

Objectives: To investigate the relationship between diabetes, mortality and exit from work using various Danish Pension schemes. Methods: We linked the Danish National Diabetes register with socioeconomic and population-based registers and followed prevalent and incident cases of diabetes for ten years, adjusting for gender, age and socio-occupational group. We analysed the proportion of individuals with diagnosed diabetes before and after entering a normal retirement pen-sion, voluntary early retirement pension or disability pension. Risk ratios for entering pensions, emigration and mortali-ty were calculated using Poisson regression. Results: Among 1,628,087 adults between the ages of 30 and 59, the relative risk for mortality was increased for those with incident and prevalent diabetes by 11-145%, compared to individuals without diabetes. Voluntary early retirement pension was the most common path out of the workforce, especially for individuals with diabetes. Compared to those without diabetes, the relative risk of disability retirement for individuals with prevalent and incident diabetes was 2.98 (95% CI, 2.89 – 3.07) and 2.40 (95% CI, 2.34 – 2.45), respectively. More than one fifth of participants were diagnosed with diabetes after retirement. There was a marked negative socio-occupational gradient for mortality, voluntary early retirement and disability pension. Conclusions: Increasing the retirement age will increase the proportion of workers who develop diabetes while still in the workforce. Since the number and severity of complications are related to longer disease duration, it is likely that, under proposed retirement reforms, more employees will experience health problems managing their jobs, especially among the most vulnerable socioeconomic groups. therefore expected to become more important as the retirement age increases. However, there is only scarce knowledge of how the incidence and prevalence of diabetes are distributed among different pension schemes.