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Cleaning kitchens and bathrooms, operating heavy machinery, carrying out agricultural work and performing repair and maintenance tasks: These are some of the activities that new research associates with poorer health later in life.

The study reconstructs the employment histories of almost 65,000 people across 27 European countries and Israel and proposes an index to assess the physical burden of work based on the tasks involved in each occupation.

The research, published in the Journal of Population Economics, is by Giacomo Pasini, professor of econometrics at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and Petru Crudu of the University of Innsbruck, a former doctoral student at Ca' Foscari.

Its main finding is an association between the physical intensity of work performed over the course of a person's career and their health after age 50. This association remains significant even after accounting for childhood circumstances, socioeconomic characteristics and lifestyle factors.

"Health also carries the imprint of the work we have done," explains Pasini. To investigate this relationship, the authors used data from SHARE, the European initiative that regularly collects data on the health, aging and retirement of people over 50 in Europe. The sample comprises 64,795 people across 27 European countries and Israel. Each occupation was assigned a physical intensity indicator.

People who performed more physically demanding work over the course of their careers were more frequently diagnosed with heart attacks, strokes and chronic lung diseases.

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