Working Overtime Ups Heart Disease Risk

A study of 6014 British civil servants aged 35-55 has found that people who regularly work three or more hours longer than a normal, 7-hour day dramatically increase their risk of heart disease. After adjusting for sociodemographic factors such as age, sex, marital status, and occupational grade, results showed that working 3-4 hours overtime (but not 1-2 hours) was associated with a 60% higher rate of coronary heart disease compared with not working overtime. Further adjustments for a total of 21 cardiovascular risk factors made little difference to the results. Study leader, Dr Marianna Virtanen, an epidemiologist at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Helsinki (Finland) and University College London (UK), said: “The association between long hours and coronary heart disease was independent of a range of risk factors that we measured at the start of the study, such as smoking, being overweight, or having high cholesterol.” The authors concluded: “Overtime work is related to increased risk of incident coronary heart disease independently of conventional risk factors. These findings suggest that overtime work adversely affects coronary health.”