Stress at work due to high strain job increases stroke risk: study

Stress at work is something most people can’t avoid especially when they are in a field that is both demanding and highly straining. Besides being physically taxing, it can also lead to depression and other mental issues. Furthermore, a new study has suggested that working in an extremely stressful job can increase the risk of developing stroke, especially among women.

Reuters Health reports that according to the research conducted at the Southern Medical University in China, high strain jobs are directly linked to higher chances of developing heart diseases, particularly ischemic stroke.

While there are several previous studies that have linked stress to the development of heart disease risk factors, senior author Dr. Dingli Xu believes that most of them have inconsistent results. This is why he and his team have decided to use a well-established formula to identify the different high-straining jobs, of which they describe as too demanding and limiting employees to reduce their control when it comes to decision-making.

Medscape adds that the researchers analyzed the results of six studies that involved the data of almost 140,000 employees from different stressful jobs over the course of 17 years. The jobs were categorized into four categories and these are the following:

• Low demand, low control passive jobs where manual laborers such as janitors and miners are classified;
• Low demand, high control low-strain jobs where professionals such as scientists, architects, and the like are classified;
• High demand, low control high-strain jobs where service industry workers such as waiters, nurse aides and the like are classified;
• High demand, high control active jobs where professionals such as doctors, engineers, teachers and the like are classified.

Besides taking 27 percent of the entire population of the participants, high demand with low control high-strain jobs have shown a 22 percent overall chance of suffering from stroke and surprisingly, no other category has shown the same risk.

Dr. Xu and his team believe that people who are highly stressed develop certain unhealthy behaviors such as poor diet, reduced physical activities, smoking, and disrupted sleeping patterns, The Huffington Post writes. This is purely guesswork as the results did not provide any actual reason for the direct link.

Dr. Jennifer Majersik from the University of Utah Health Care wrote in the accompanying editorial that while the study showed well-conducted points, it did not consider other variables such as pre-existing stroke or metabolic dysfunction. But, Dr. Majersik believes it showed potential and medical experts can confidently tell patients that work stress may lead to stroke.

The study was published in the online journal Neurology last October 14.