There could be many reasons for that. I would like to see the comparisons between Americans life expectancy after retirement vs. Europeans (removing all people

There could be many reasons for that. I would like to see the comparisons between Americans life expectancy after retirement vs. Europeans (removing all people who quickly start work again after retirement). People who have stressful jobs and then go on long vacations often get sick the first few days into it. It seems to me to be some kind of "stress dump" as your body and mind begin to ease into a lower stress environment. In the US we get such a small amount of vacation days, my personal (completely unchecked) hypothesis is that when people retire they finally get to do that dump that Europeans are doing once or more per year but the strain of a 60+ year dump is too much for their bodies to handle.