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Alcohol usage linked to working longer hours

Researchers discovered a correlation between adults working long hours and alcohol use, according to a new study.

Marianna Virtanen, PhD, of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, and colleagues conducted a systematic review of cross-sectional and prospective studies from PubMed and Embase, along with manual searches, to gauge the association between working long hours and alcohol use.

Marianna Virtanen

The cross-sectional analysis represented 333,693 participants from 14 countries and 61 studies. The prospective analysis included 100,602 participants from nine countries, and were from 20 studies. Individual participant data was available in 18 of the evaluated studies, allowing researchers to assess the European Union Working Time Directive, which recommends working no more than 48 hours per week.

For the individual participant data, 7.5% of employees worked longer than 55 hours per week and the prevalence of alcohol use was 11.7%. The researchers found an association between long working hours and alcohol use in the cross-sectional analyses (OR=1.11; 95% CI, 1.05-1.18) and the prospective studies (aOR=1.12; 95% CI, 1.04-1.2).

The researchers found no difference in associations between men and women, age, socioeconomic groups, geographical regions, sample type, prevalence of risky alcohol use in the cohort or sample attrition rate.

“The workplace is an important setting for the prevention of alcohol misuse, because more than half of the adult population are employed,” the researchers wrote. “Further research is needed to assess whether preventive interventions against risky alcohol use could benefit from information on working hours.”

Disclosure: The authors report no relevant financial disclosures.