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The effect of heavy smoking on retirement risk: A mendelian randomisation analysis
Alessio Gaggero1, Olesya Ajnakina2, Eugenio Zucchelli3
1Department of Quantitative Methods for Economics and Business, Universidad de Granada (UGR), Spain.
Background And Aims:
The extent to which heavy smoking and retirement risk are causally related remains to be determined. To overcome the endogeneity of heavy smoking behaviour, we employed a novel approach by exploiting the genetic predisposition to heavy smoking, as measured with a polygenic risk score (PGS), in a Mendelian Randomisation approach.
Methods:
8164 participants (mean age 68.86 years) from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing had complete data on smoking behaviour, employment and a heavy smoking PGS. Heavy smoking was indexed as smoking at least 20 cigarettes a day. A time-to-event Mendelian Randomization (MR) analysis, using a complementary log-log (cloglog) link function, was employed to model the retirement risk.
Results:
Our results show that being a heavy smoker significantly increases the risk of retirement (β = 1.324, standard error = 0.622, p < 0.05). Results were robust to a battery of checks and a placebo analysis considering the never-smokers.
Conclusions:
Overall, our findings support a causal pathway from heavy smoking to earlier retirement.
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