A recent analysis indicates that women who work 55 hours or more per week have a 30% higher risk of having a stroke than those working standard hours, making them just as likely to have a stroke as their male counterparts. The analysis was conducted by European public health re-searchers. It involved data from over 600,000 women and men enrolled in long-term observational studies in Europe and the United States. It was the first such analysis of the relationship between working long hours and stroke. The researchers noted several factors that might have contributed to the elevated stroke risk, including the additional stress of balancing the extra work hours, inactivity, long periods of sitting, and ignoring stroke warning signs. The findings serve as a reminder to try to reduce stress at work. Break every hour for a short walk and a few minutes of deep breathing. And don’t dismiss symptoms like sudden headache, weakness, or vision loss. They demand immediate medical attention.
The research, found that people working between 41 hours and 48 hours a week had a 10% higher risk of stroke than those working between 35 hours and 40 hours. People who worked 49 hours to 54 hours had a 27% higher risk, and those working 55 or more hours had a 33% higher risk. The researchers also found a similar but more modest link between such long hours and an increased risk of coronary heart disease “Long working hours are not a negligible occurrence,” Urban Janlert, a researcher from the Umea University in Sweden, wrote in a commentary. Janlert pointed out that in many countries, a high percentage of workers put in more than 50 hours a week which probably puts them at risk for devastating events such as stroke or conditions including heart disease.
Janlert said he wondered whether long working hours is an “avoidable cause of stroke” and called the study the “strongest indication of a causal association.” Prevention of stroke and heart disease has focused almost exclusively on measures such as diet, exercise and medicine. But studies similar to this one have shown that work conditions can also be critically important.“Essentially, if long working hours present a danger to health, it should be possible to change them, which is not always the case with other work environmental factors,” Janlert wrote.
Study author Mika Kivimaki, a professor of epidemiology and public health, and her colleagues found a similar but more modest link between working long hours and an increased risk of coronary heart disease in a separate meta-analysis they conducted. Those who worked 55 hours or more a week had a 13 percent increased risk of a new diagnosis, hospitalization or death from heart disease.“The pooling of all available studies allowed us to investigate the association between working hours and cardiovascular risk with greater precision than has previously been possible,” Kivimaki said in a statement.
Concern over the impact of long hours on a person’s health has been growing in recent years. Earlier this month, a study in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine by researchers at Harvard and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that working more than 40 hours a week and regularly engaging in heavy lifting may adversely impact a woman’s ability to become pregnant. Research participants consisted of 1,739 female nurses who wanted to conceive, and those who worked more than 40 hours took 20 percent more time to get pregnant compared with those working 21 to 40 hours.
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