Friday, September 14, 2012

The risk of work-place stress

People with highly stressful jobs but little real control over decision making are running a 23% increased risk of a heart attack, according to authoritative research.

The definition used by authors of the study in the Lancet medical journal is precise. They considered job strain to involve high demands on the individual and little freedom to make his or her own decisions about how and when to do the work. This sort of stress is to be found among all sorts of people, holding down all sorts of jobs on both high and low salaries, said one of the authors of the study, Professor Andrew Steptoe of the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London.

"It is the coupling [of high demand and low control] that is problematic," he said. "It is more common in low income jobs where people are doing the same thing again and again, such as assembly line work, but it is across the whole social spectrum. A doctor could be someone who has very high skills but might well feel that they have very little control over how quickly they can work, and they have high demands on them."

 200,000 people in the studies were followed for an average of 7.5 years, during which time there were 2,356 heart attacks or other first-time coronary heart disease events. Among those who met the definition for job strain, the risk was 23% higher than among the others, even after taking into account potentially confounding factors such as lifestyle, age, gender and socio-economic status.

There were other factors in the workplace which could affect stress and health, Steptoe added. "There is uncertainty of employment and whether wages are going up in the way they expected," he said.

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