THURSDAY, Nov. 5 (HealthDay News) -- What you're not doing once retired seems to make a good night's sleep come more easily.

A study of nearly 15,000 French workers who had retired found that the odds of having disturbed sleep in the seven years after retirement were 26 percent lower than in the seven years before they stopped working.

Sleep improvements probably had less to do with how they were spending their retirement, though, than with the removal of the demands and psychological stress associated with working, the researchers said.

The study's lead author called the finding a surprise. "Earlier studies showed a strong link between work stress and disturbed sleep, but research on the health consequences of retirement had produce conflicting results," said Dr. Jussi Vahtera, a professor of public health at the University of Turku in Finland. "Retirement had been hypothesized to represent an additional stressor in some studies, but a relief in other studies."

The prevalence of sleep disturbances among the French retirees, all former employees of a government gas and electric company, fell from about 24 percent in the year before retirement to about 18 percent in the first year after retiring. No attempt was made to determine the specific type of sleep disturbances the retirees experienced.

The biggest reduction was seen among men who had reported depression or mental fatigue before retirement. Improvements in sleep after retiring were also most pronounced among men, management-level workers and workers who had been shift workers or had held jobs considered psychologically demanding.

The only retirees who failed to experience improved sleep were those who had quit working for health reasons.

The study participants had employment benefits that have become less common, including guaranteed job stability, a mandatory retirement age between 55 and 60 years and a pension that provided 80 percent of pre-retirement pay.

Workers with less generous benefits might not experience similar improvements in post-retirement sleep, Vahtera said.

"We believe these findings are largely applicable in situations where the financial incentives not to retire are relatively weak," he said. "In countries and positions where there is no proper pension level to guarantee financial security beyond working age, it might well be that retirement is followed by severe stress, disturbing sleep even more than before retirement."

Dr. James P. Krainson, medical director of the South Florida Sleep Diagnostic Center in Miami, called the study "interesting but preliminary."

"The data come from a single employer, and there is no analogous employer in the U.S.," he said. "Better sleep may be something to look forward to in retirement, but nothing is definitive in this report. More research is needed."

The study, published Nov. 1 in Sleep, was based on annual questionnaires completed by 11,581 men and 3,133 women who retired between 1990 and 2006 at an average age of 55.

More information

The National Sleep Foundation has tips for a good night's sleep  .

FRIDAY, Oct. 30 (HealthDay News) -- Illness and surgery don't contribute to long-term cognitive decline in seniors and don't accelerate progression of dementia, researchers say.

The findings of a new study, published in the November issue of Anesthesiology, challenge the widely held belief that elderly patients suffer major deterioration in mental function after surgery.

"The concerns surrounding postoperative cognitive decline (POCD) following surgery certainly will not evaporate following publication of this study," researcher Michael S. Avidan, of the Washington University School of Medicine, said in a news release from the American Society of Anesthesiologists. "The important message to take from these findings is that persistent cognitive deterioration following surgery might not be a major public health problem. The decision to proceed with surgery should presently be made based on a person's general health and the specific risks and benefits of the procedure."

For the study, Avidan and colleagues looked at 575 patients tested annually at Washington University's Alzheimer Disease Research Center. At the start of the study, 361 patients had very mild or mild dementia and 214 were dementia-free. The patients were divided into three groups -- those who'd undergone non-cardiac surgery, those with illness, and those with neither.

Long-term follow-up showed no difference in cognitive decline among the three groups. Patients with dementia did have a more marked cognitive decline than those without dementia. Among those without dementia at the start of the study, 23 percent developed detectable cognitive impairment during the study period, but the decline was not more common among those who had surgery or illness, the researchers found.

"With mounting basic science studies implicating POCD as a real phenomenon, coupled with long-term outcome studies associating POCD with increased mortality, it is now imperative to conduct properly designed studies with meaningful clinical endpoints to determine whether any specific surgery, anesthetic technique or patient characteristic might be independently associated with long-term POCD," Avidan said.

More information

The AGS Foundation for Health in Aging has more about surgery and hospitalization.

FRIDAY, Oct. 30 (HealthDay News) -- Seniors with dementia are diagnosed with flu less often, have shorter hospital stays and are 50 percent more likely to die than those without dementia, says a U.S. study that looked at flu and pneumonia in adults 65 and older.

"The increased mortality of older patients with dementia hospitalized for flu may be indicative of inadequacies in health-care quality and accessibility," the study's senior author, Elena Naumova, a professor of public health and community medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, said in a university news release. "It could be beneficial to refine guidelines for the immunization, testing and treatment of flu in older patients with dementia when planning for the possibility of a flu pandemic."

She and her colleagues analyzed five years of data, from 1998 to 2002, from the U.S. Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services, including 36 million hospitalization records for people 65 and older. More than 6 million people had a pneumonia and influenza diagnosis, including more than 800,000 (13 percent) with dementia.

Early diagnosis and treatment of flu in people with dementia can be difficult because they often have trouble communicating as a result of poor oral hygiene or impaired swallowing, the researchers said. This can make it difficult to talk to doctors about symptoms or complications.

The researchers also believe that limited access to health-care services and inadequate testing practices could contribute to lower rates of flu diagnosis and higher rates of death among older people with dementia. Their analysis of the data showed that pneumonia and flu rates were highest among older adults in poor and rural areas, where there are fewer health-care centers.

"Limited access to specialized health-care services can delay diagnosis and treatment of the flu, causing it to progress to pneumonia, the fifth leading cause of death among the elderly," Naumova said. "This study has helped us identify this vulnerable population, and now further study is needed to confirm the findings and assess the testing and vaccination policies for older patients with dementia.

The study was published online Oct. 26 in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about seasonal flu.