THE AUTHORS REPLY

摘要

We thank Dr. Alexopoulos (1) for his interest in our work (2). In his Setter, Dr. Alexopoulos expresses his concern regarding the appropriateness of using the ages of 60 or 65 years as cutoffs for defining retirement as early or usual, given the pension schemes that existed in Greece until recently. It is for this reason, however, that, in our main analysis, we avoided using a cutoff for age at retirement, but we assessed the impact of retirement in a comparison of retirees with still-working persons of the same age as well as by estimating the mortality ratio associated with a 5-year increase in age at retirement among retirees. The ages of 65 and 60 years were used to assess the possibility of effect modification only. These analyses revealed no evidence of such an effect. Dr. Alexopoulos refers to stratification, but gender was the only factor used for stratification, and it was not related to the issues he refers to.