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Job stress associated with greater risk for heart disease

Those who have highly demanding and stressful jobs and little control at work were 23% more likely to experience coronary heart disease vs. those without work stress, according to new study results.

Mika Kivimäki, PhD, of the University of College London, and colleagues analyzed job-related stress in nearly 200,000 adults who took part in 13 studies conducted in seven European countries between 1985 and 2006. The studies’ participants did not have coronary heart disease (CHD) at the time of the baseline assessments.

Questionnaires were used to assess job demands, workload, insufficient time, and whether the individual had freedom to make decisions and learn new things at work. Information about incident CHD was obtained from national hospital admission and death registries in all studies.

Between 13% and 22% of the participants included in the studies reported job strain. Job strain was associated with a significant increase in the risk for incident CHD (HR=1.23; 95% CI, 1.10-1.37). Even after controlling for factors such as age, gender and socioeconomic status, the 23% higher risk remained the same.

According to Kivimäki and colleagues, the overall population attributable risk for CHD was approximately 3.4% (95% CI, 1.5-5.4), which suggests that if the association between job strain and CHD were causal, then job strain would account for a sizeable proportion of CHD events in working populations.

The researchers added that future interventions should target job stress to decrease CHD incidence in the workforce. However, this strategy would have a smaller effect on CHD incidence than addressing standard risk factors such as smoking and physical inactivity.

“The pooling of published and unpublished studies allowed us to investigate the association between coronary heart disease and exposure to job strain … with greater precision than has been previously possible,” Kivimäki said in a press release.

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.