Recent study shows that people may check having a high stress job to the list of things that could increase your risk for stroke. The researchers reviewed six previous studies that gave contrasting results on the topic in the past. Dingli Xu, MD from Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China explained that having a lot of job stress has been associated to heart disease, but studies associating this and stroke have shown inconsistent results. CBS News reported that in order to correct these findings, Xu and colleagues analyzed the previous half dozen studies involving more than 138,000 participants who were monitored for periods ranging from 3 to 17 years.
They divided the jobs into four groups based on how much control workers had over their work and how demanding the job was. Job demands including time pressure, mental load, and coordination burdens were all taken into consideration. The total number of hours worked and how much physical labor was involved in a job were not considered in the study this time.
The four job categories were: Passive jobs, these are jobs with low demand or low control. Jobs like janitors, miners, and other types of manual laborers were under this category. Second, Low stress jobs are jobs with low demand but has high work control. Natural scientists and architects are just some examples for the second classification. High demand and low control jobs are next in the category. They are called high stress jobs. Service industry jobs, including waitressing and nursing aides are under the third category. Lastly, active jobs which are the last category are jobs requiring high demand and high work control from workers. Doctors, teachers, and engineers are some examples for this category.
The researchers discovered that between 11 and 27 percent of participants in the six studies that were evaluated held jobs considered as high stress jobs. They explained that people with these jobs had a 22% greater risk of stroke than people with low stress jobs. They also emphasized that women were more susceptible to stroke, and those women who held high stress jobs had a 33% higher risk of stroke than other women who having different jobs.
The study indicated that people with high stress jobs were also 58% more likely to have an ischemic stroke than those with low stress jobs. This is the kind of stroke that occurs as a result of an obstruction within a blood vessel that supplies blood to the brain, according to the American Heart Association which accounts for about 87% of cases.
