Cumulative days of long work hours may lead to ischemic heart disease in men
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Men who worked long hours for at least 10 years had elevated risk for ischemic heart disease, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
The same association was not found among women workers.
Researchers retrospectively assessed exposure to long working hours, duration of long working hours and risk factors including age, sex, BMI, smoking, BP, diabetes and familial history of CVD in the CONSTANCES population-based cohort. Part-time employees and participants who reported a CV event within 5 years before exposure to long working hours were excluded.
Long working hours was defined as working for more than 10 hours daily for at least 50 days per year.
Exposure to long working hours for 10 years or more was significantly associated with ischemic heart disease (adjusted OR = 1.24; 95% CI, 1.08-1.43). Researchers found that this association was stronger after exclusion of patients who experienced angina pectoris (aOR = 1.31; 95% CI, 1.11-1.56).
However, these associations were not found among women who worked longer hours, whether they experienced angina pectoris (aOR = 0.9; 95% CI, 0.55-1.49) or not (aOR = 0.82; 95% CI, 0.41-1.65).
“This large-scale epidemiological study found moderate yet robust associations between cumulative exposure to long working hours and occurrence of ischemic heart disease among men,” Marc Fadel, MD, of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, Villejuif, France, and colleagues wrote. “Intervention and implementation research should address the reduction of cumulative exposure to long working hours as a step toward attenuating the global burden of work-related ischemic heart disease.”
Researchers also found that results were similar without adjusting for diabetes and BP.
“These observed differences have several possible explanations, including lack of statistical power given the low numbers of ischemic heart disease events among women with long working hours in our sample, and exclusion of participants with predominantly part-time job may also contribute to these differences (more women with part-time jobs),” the researchers wrote. “The observed sex differences in our study and others are worth future exploration to examine other potential explanations including differently gendered work and sex-specific worker survivor effects, changes in work trajectory attributable to child-rearing, diagnostic biases and other cultural and biological differences.”
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