Search Here

A study of about 200,000 European people has revealed that those who are in highly demanding jobs and have little freedom to make decisions and are 23 percent more likely to experience a heart attack when compared to those with lesser work stress.

"The pooling of published and unpublished studies allowed us to investigate the association between coronary heart disease (CHD) and exposure to job strain [defined by high work demands and low decision control] with greater precision than has been previously possible", explains Mika Kivimäki from University College London who led the research. "Our findings indicate that job strain is associated with a small, but consistent, increased risk of experiencing a first CHD event such as a heart attack."

Earlier studies on the influence of job strain on CHD have yielded inconsistent findings and lacked methodology.

The current study by Kivimäki and colleagues is an analysis of job strain in employees without CHD who participated in 13 European national cohorts conducted in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Netherlands, Sweden and the UK between 1985 and 2006.

For the study, the participants were quizzed at the beginning of the study about their job demands, workload, the level of time-pressure demands and freedom to make decisions.

The participants were then followed up for an average 7.5 years, during which, there were 2356 events of incident CHD (first non-fatal heart attack or coronary death).

It was found that those with higher work pressure and demanding jobs were at a 23 percent higher risk of CHD even after factors like lifestyle, age, gender and socioeconomic status were taken into consideration.

"The overall population attributable risk (PAR) for CHD events was around 3.4 percent suggesting that if the association were causal, then job strain would account for a notable proportion of CHD events in working populations. As such, reducing workplace stress might decrease disease incidence. However, this strategy would have a much smaller effect than tackling standard risk factors such as smoking (PAR 36%) and physical inactivity (PAR 12%)," said Kivimäki.

"Job strain is a measure of only part of a psychosocially damaging work environment, which implies that prevention of workplace stress could reduce incidence of coronary heart disease to a greater extent than stated in the authors' interpretation of the calculated population-attributable risk for job strain," Bo Netterstrøm from Bispebjerg Hospital, Copehagen, Denmark notes in a linked comment, according to Medical Xpress.

"Exposures such as job insecurity and factors related to social capital and emotions, are likely to be of major importance in the future. The present economic crisis will almost certainly increase this importance," he adds.

The study was published Online in The Lancet.