Work is bad for the heart

A Danish study of more than 12,000 nurses has reported a link between work-related stress and an increased risk of heart disease in women aged 50 and below.

The study, reported in the Occupational and Environmental Medicine journal, asked female nurses aged between 45 and 64 about pressure at work and tracked their health for 15 years, from 1993 to 2008. Over this period, 580 had been admitted to hospital with ischaemic heart disease — including 369 with angina and 138 with heart attacks.

After taking into account the effects of smoking and diabetes, the study concluded that those who said that pressure at work was much too high were 35% more likely to have developed heart disease than those nurses who said that their work pressures were manageable.

An analysis of the results by age showed that only those nurses under the age of 51 were at significant risk of heart disease.

The researchers said that additional work should be carried out to identify factors contributing to what was seen as high work pressure.

A long-running study in the UK — Whitehall II — has been tracking the health of more than 10,000 civil servants since 1985.

This study recently reported that people working three hours or more of overtime a day have a 60% increased risk of developing some form of heart disease.

However, the researchers had not measured what happens if people cut their working hours.