Stress at work and high BP

A new study has reported that when workers spend years at a high stress job, blood pressure reflects the strain. Men who worked for 25 years or more at a demanding job over which they felt little control, had a large increase in blood pressure. It is a known fact that the risk of high blood pressure goes up with age and work stress is one of the reasons. In more primitive societies blood pressure does not go up at all with age. Researchers at the department of community and preventive medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, interviewed 213 men about their job histories. The impact of current working conditions had already been studied in these men in a trial called the Work Site Blood Pressure Study. The men were asked about characteristics of their jobs. For example, to determine how much control the men had over their work environment, men were asked about how much freedom they had to make decisions and whether they could choose how to perform their work. Researchers also tried to determine how demanding the job was and stress due to their jobs.The men were 30 to 60 years old when the study started so some had already had many years on the job. When they took a closer look at previous job experience, they found that 25 or more years in a highly demanding, low-control job led to an extra 4.8 mmHg rise in systolic blood pressure when the men were at work and 7.9 mmHg rise when the men were at home than that of men with no past exposure, independent of current exposure. Researchers hope that studies like this will encourage employers to try to find ways to make jobs less stressful.

A previous study, by the same researchers, showed that men who were currently in high stress jobs had an increase of 6 to 8 mmHg in systolic blood pressure - the upper number in the blood pressure reading - compared to workers in low stress jobs. One question the previous study had not answered was whether job stress over many years would have a cumulative effect.Workers should be allowed to have a greater say regarding their work. They can be given more flexible schedules and a chance to develop more skills on the job. Overtime can be made voluntary rather than mandatory. Changes in the work environment could lead to a much healthier work force.