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Everyone knows someone who works 50 or more hour work weeks. That person may even be you.
There’s bad news for these workaholics: This much work could be linked to an increase in stroke risk.
And these results aren’t just based on some small independent study either.
This set of results is based off of 17 studies, consisting of 528,908 men and women and their working patterns, whom they followed for 7.2 years.
What they found was that people who work 55 hours or more a week showed a 33 percent increase in risk for stroke. They also were found to have a 13 percent increase in risk for heart disease.
Those who worked between a 41 and 54 hour work week saw a slightly higher increase.
Of course, it’s probably not the work itself that is causing it. It’s the lifestyle.
Though this study showed that the risk for stroke remained even once they took smoking, alcohol consumption, and physical activity level into account, they say that many of these are contributing factors to the increased risk for heart disease. Repetitive stress, another common occurrence in long work weeks, is another contributing factor.
Those in charge of the study said that this knowledge should be something health officials and employers take note of, since a long work week is not an uncommon occurrence in most countries.
Even in countries where there are regulated legal work hours, they’re not always very carefully monitored.
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This means that if doctors are advising their patients of cardiovascular risk, they should be taking into account how long their work week is, according to these researchers.
