Women with Stressful Jobs are at Risk for Heart Disease

By: Preet Gulati

4/01/2016

Women who are finding themselves stressed with their job or working long hours could be at a higher
risk to develop heart disease says a new study.
Research that was conducted by the Womens Health Study was one of the first groups to have found
strong evidence to explain how psychological stress women deal with primarily from their career can be
at a 40 percent higher risk to develop heart disease in the future.
These health researchers monitored a large group of women over a 10 year span through a process of
regularly received clinical findings and personality/mood questionnaire given monthly to determine the
level of stress a woman was undergoing.
The job related stressors given by the womens feedback in the study provided strong evidence that high
levels in depressive/anxious symptoms, physical activity, alcohol intake, average household income, and
lower education attainment were all at 38 percent larger risk.
Our findings extend previous work on job strain by demonstrating a relationship between job strain at
baseline and clinically-validated cardio vascular disease end points in a large cohort of relatively healthy
women. Michelle A. Albert, researcher from Harvard Medical School says.
The sample of 39,876 women from the study were actual health care professionals that volunteered
from the Womens Health Study. This group included registered nurses, licensed practical/visiting
nurses, medical doctors, and other health related professionals. The sample was organized and balanced
through previous health history, age, and profession.
With a large prevalence of women in the working class today, the wellbeing of women has become
crucial to understand with heart disease being on the leading cause of death for both women and men.
Each year the sample of women were given the same questionnaire that was designed by psychiatrists
from the group to indicate the different levels of stress women dealt with in physical activity, strain and
insecurity in their job. The questions had four levels of responses to stress that were diagnosed from
depending on the frequency to their responses over the years.
Women who were working for two years consistently could only be part of this study that helped
researchers come to accurate results. The women that were diagnosed with high levels of working
conditions and were very physically active according to their responses resulted with higher rates in
having heart disease amongst the working class.
Limited studies prior to this one had only monitored womens trend for half the duration that did not
include important risk factors from womens demographic background such as age, race/ethnicity,
education, income, employment, marital status, and parental history.

Findings from the study help better understand early studies done that were trying to prove how single
types of cardio vascular diseases were being caused by only one factor either strain or amount of
activity exerted.
However, the study did not monitor other possible stressors that these women could have been
undergoing at the time of the questionnaires. This study only specified its questions for job related
stress that makes findings questionable of whether the stress is primarily from the womens career.
A strong point for this study shows the consistency in following up with the same women consecutively
over a ten year trial. The outcomes of the study make a strong argument that women who were under
more strain and exerted high levels of activity in their job resulted with more strokes, deaths, coronary
artery bypass and other heart diseases.
From 1998 to 2012 the sample of women that was condensed to just about 40,000 women were
followed up by experts with health reports from healthcare practitioners, stress questioners and
monitored their demographics yearly to help pin point particular causes.
From a mechanistic perspective, job strain may influence risk of cardio vascular disease indirectly
through behavioral responses such as smoking and depression or directly via physiological stress
processes resulting in hypertension or the metabolic syndrome.
Out of the three factors from what experts believed to have been a potential long-term effect for heart
disease, job insecurity was not one of them. Women under stress who reflected concern about a future
job loss showed no correlation to heart disease that was also proven from earlier studies.
The Womens Health Study comprised of health care professionals from all over the United States were
able to monitor a large group of women as one of the longest studies to find a linkage between job
strain and heart disease. The questionnaires were specially designed to help determine the state of
mind and level of stress each women was undergoing at the time.
Experts monitored physical reports through checkup appointments, incidents of any minor or major
occurrences of their health. This included BMI (Body Mass Index), depressive/anxious symptoms,
physical activity, alcohol intake and prevalence of hypertension.
The largest observation that was made by this study was the psychological stressors like depression was
one of the strongest predictors for any cardiovascular disease. Experts from the study explained how
important it should be for the next study to include and identify other social and personal physiological
factors that could be another heart disease factor.
An expert from the study say Further knowledge about the effects of job-related stressors on
cardiovascular health among women is important, given the dramatic increase in female participation in
the labor force over the past several decades, and that psychosocial stressors may affect women and
men in distinct ways.