Beijing: Having a high stress job is linked to an increased risk of stroke, especially in women, a new study has warned. “Having a lot of job stress has been linked to heart disease, but studies on job stress and stroke have shown inconsistent results,” said Dingli Xu, with Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China.
“It’s possible that high stress jobs lead to more unhealthy behaviours, such as poor eating habits, smoking and a lack of exercise,” Xu said. The meta-analysis by Xu and colleagues looked at all of the available research on job strain and stroke risk. The six studies analysed involved a total of 138,782 participants who were followed for three to 17 years. Jobs were classified into four groups based on how much control workers had over their jobs and how hard they worked, or the psychological demands of the job.
The job demands included time pressure, mental load and coordination burdens. Physical labour and total number of hours worked were not included. Passive jobs were those with low demand and low control. Examples include janitors, miners and other manual labourers. Low stress jobs are those with low demand and high control. Examples are natural scientists and architects.
High stress jobs, which are high demand and low control, are found in the service industry and include waitresses and nursing aides. Active jobs with high demand and high control include doctors, teachers and engineers. In the six studies, the percentage of those with high stress jobs ranged from 11 per cent to 27 per cent of participants.
Researchers found that people with high stress jobs had a 22 per cent higher risk of stroke than those with low stress jobs. Women with high stress jobs had a 33 per cent higher risk of stroke than women with low stress jobs. People with high stress jobs were 58 per cent more likely to have an ischemic stroke than those with low stress jobs.
Ischemic stroke, which is the most common type of stroke, is caused by blockage of blood flow. People in passive and active jobs did not have any increased risk of stroke. The researchers calculated that 4.4 per cent of the stroke risk was due to the high stress jobs. For women, that number increased to 6.5 per cent. The study is published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
