Stressful Jobs Induce Heart Diseases in Women

Your boss's last minute order to complete a task is giving you a heart an attack. We would have never imagined that this figure of speech would one day hold true. A new study claims that women who rate their jobs as highly demanding and stressful were at an increased risk of becoming victims of heart attacks, stroke or other heart related diseases.

The study conducted by Dr. Michelle Albert and her colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston focused on more than 22,000 female health professionals over a period of 10 years. The women's average age was 57. They noticed that women who were dealing with high stress jobs were much likely to suffer a heart attack.

"Previous long-term studies of job strain, defined by the combination of psychological demand and job control, and heart disease risk have mainly focused on men and a more restricted set of cardiovascular conditions," said Dr Albert, a cardiologist and researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "Our study indicates that high job strain can negatively affect your health. There are immediate and definite long-term, clinically documented cardiovascular health effects of job strain in women, and it is important for women and their health care providers to pay attention to the stresses of their job," Dr Albert explained in a news release from Partners HealthCare.

According to the researchers women who had a highly stressful job and who tried to control the stress level related to their work such as physicians, executives, nurses were also susceptible to cardiovascular events.

The researchers also included factors like depression and anxiety and they noticed that these factors explained only 20 percent of the relationship. On the other hand job insecurity did not appear to increase the risk of heart attacks or stroke.

According to the researchers the new study cannot be associated with everyone. Because this study doesn't consider other factors that can affect health such as owing money or being departed from a close family member.

Albert concluded saying, "We live in an environment where you just don't have one type of stressor. You have multiple types of stress, so there's a great need to look at the joint impact of different stressors on cardiovascular disease."