Being A Workaholic Increases The Risk Of Heart Disease By 80%, A Study Concludes

Employees who work overtime usually for more than 8 hours a day, are prone to suffer from heart attacks and strokes later on in life as a study shows an increase in risk by almost 80%.

In explaining the factors that lead to heart disease, one of the study’s authors wrote, “There are several potential mechanisms that may underlie the association between long working hours and heart disease. One is prolonged exposure to psychological stress.”

Simply put, the long hours put in combined with increased stress levels, blood pressure and an unhealthy diet can take a toll on workaholics putting them at risk in suffering from premature heart problems. However, this isn’t the first study that has linked heart health or the lack of it to long working hours.

In fact, the lead researcher of this study, Dr. Marianna Virtanen, compiled these findings based on 12 studies whose data goes back all the way to 1958 and which included almost 22000 participants from the Netherlands, Britain, United States, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Japan.

Among the studies performed, the ones where participants suffered from the greatest risk of heart disease were the ones where participants were asked to recall their working hours. In other studies, where the participants’ working hours were monitored by the team, the risk of heart disease stood at about 40 percent.

In an earlier study conducted three years ago, Dr. Virtanen concluded that working long hours was just as bad as smoking in increasing the risk of dementia as one gets older.