Retire at your own risk. Recent research suggests that stayingon the job into your senior years helps you stay healthy.

A study by researchers at the University of Miami of more than83,000 Americans over the age of 65 found that retirement andunemployment correlate with poorer health, even after controllingfor a number of predictors, including smoking andobesity.

Read: Workers anticipate retirement as just morework

The survey was based on government data on senior citizens from1997 to 2011.

The study also showed, perhaps contrary to conventional wisdom,that the most physically demanding jobs were the most likely tokeep workers healthy.Service sector employees were the least likelyto suffer from chronic conditions that limited theirfunctioning.

The results suggest that, while many blue-collar workers run agreater risk of injury on the job, such accidents may pose less ofa risk to a worker's health than the sedentary lifestyle thatwhite-collar employment facilitates.

But blue-collar workers may also simply be healthier becausethose who do acquire physical impediments are forced to quit, whileolder white-collar workers can stay on the job despite a number ofhealth issues.

"The only way these workers can stay in the labor force is tohave better health," Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health atthe University of Illinois Chicago, told HealthDayNews.

One of the chief benefits of staying on the job is the regularsocial contact a workplace provides people in their later years.And for workers with lower incomes, many jobs provide morecomprehensive health insurance than they might receive throughMedicare.

Read: 9 industries and how they match up withretirement plans

"Remaining in the labor force is healthier for you. It'shealthier because working keeps you physically and mentallyengaged," Olshanksky said.

For that reason, he argues, workers shouldn't beforced to retire at a certain age.Doing so might actually deprive them of the benefits thatretirement was originally designed to provide.