Those who worked under the other job categories had no increased risk of stroke.
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“While the study shows an increased risk of stroke, we don’t yet know how stress leads to increased vascular disease”, Majersik adds.
People who have high-stress jobs may have an increased risk of stroke, according to a new analysis of previous research. Physical burdens were not taken into consideration.
When the investigators looked at the participants’ gender, they found that women with high-stress jobs were 33 percent more likely to have a stroke than those with low-stress jobs.
Active jobs with high demand and high control include doctors, teachers and engineers. The categories included passive jobs, low-stress jobs, high-stress jobs and active jobs.
To define the stress levels of jobs, researchers divided them in four categories: high strain job, passive jobs, active jobs and low strain jobs.
The percentage of participants in the six studies with high stress jobs ranged from 11 to 27 percent.
It’s not clear why those with high strain jobs have a higher stroke risk, the researchers said.
Work stress is also associated with cardiovascular risk factors such as metabolic syndrome, high body mass index, impaired glucose metabolism, and dyslipidemia, the researchers noted, and may lead to neuroendocrine disturbances like over-activation of the sympathetic nervous system.
Most of the workers involved in this study had jobs which implied great responsibilities, but they were not necessarily stressful.
The results emerged after analysis of earlier studies and researchers point out that those in stressful jobs tend to eat and drink less healthily and smoke more. Ischemic stroke is the most common type of stroke, which is caused by the blockage of blood flow. Stressed-out workers might cope by smoking, eating fast food, skipping out on the gym or making other choices that increase their stroke risk. The study appeared online in Neurolog, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Senior author Dr. Dingli Xu of Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, told Reuters Health that earlier research on the relation of work stress and stroke were not conclusive in their results.
While strategies to mitigate stress are increasingly popular in the tech industry, little is done to assist service workers, who are the most exposed to these dangers.
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Scientists said stress in a job was largely dependent on feeling in control and respected. Employers could redesign jobs to give workers more control over their tasks, and workers could use cognitive behavioral therapy, relaxation therapy or other psychological methods, the study authors wrote.
