Live longer in a village

Moving to retirement club ‘can add years to women’s life expectancy’

RETIREMENT villages can boost women’s life expectancy by several years, research suggested yesterday.

This is because communal living helps combat the negative effects on health and social wellbeing of low economic means and isolation in later life.

And economically deprived women who did move into such a village lived as long as women from the wealthiest section of society who remained more remote, the findings showed.

The report by the Cass Business School at City, University of London, concluded that retirement villages could help in the Government’s plan to redress the imbalance in mortality rates between different classes.

It analysed the records of 2,614 residents who l i ved at Whiteley Village, near Walton- on-Thames in Surrey. The village is run by a charity to provide housing for people of limited means.

Whiteley’s oldest resident is currently a 106-year-old woman. Remarkably, there have been 11 centenarians, all of t hem women, living there during the past 12 months – when the experts would have expected there to be no more than two.

The retirement village has 500 residents living in a mixture of Grade II-listed cottages, selfcontained flats and a nursing home. Instead of rent, residents pay a monthly ‘amenity charge’, typically £893 for a one-bed- room cottage or £1,025 for a two-bedroom double cottage. The village has a shop, post office, hairdressing salon, licensed bar, allotments, and there are more than 20 clubs including water fitness, golf, bowls and photography.

The report’s authors found that a woman who arrived at the village in 1960 at the age of 67 could expect to live for 18.2 more years – 4.9 years longer than the average.

By 1980, as general l i ving s t andards f or pensioners improved, the gap had narrowed but a f emale resident who arrived aged 67 could still have expected to live for another 18.5 years – or 3.3 years more than a person in their economic group. This put them ahead of women in the richest 20 per cent of the population nationally.

The effect was less significant for men, but the majority lived at least as long on average as a male in the wider population.

Men do not receive the same level of ‘longevity boost’ because they tend to join the village at an older age and some may have already damaged their health through smoking or their jobs, the researchers said. The study was published by the think-tank International Longevity Centre UK.

Yesterday study author Professor Les Mayhew said: ‘Good living in old age – being looked after and living in a community – is the bedrock for increased longevity in old age.

‘Good health care is necessary, but in my view you can prevent a lot of hospital admissions and attendances at A&E if people are looked after properly.

‘Coupled with social interaction, it helps to prevent common medical conditions that can lead to worse conditions.’