A large study shows that working more than 50 hours a week increases the risk of having a stroke by 33% and the risk of developing coronary heart disease by 13%.
Working more than 50 hours a week significantly increases the risk of stroke and coronary heart disease, according to a extensive study published this Thursday in the newspaper The Lancet.
To carry out their work, researchers collected data from around twenty studies on more than 600,000 people living in Europe, the United States and Australia and followed for more than 8 years. They then found that men and women working more than 55 hours per week have 13% more risk of suffering from coronary heart disease compared to people who work between 35 and 40 hours.
At the same time, the analysis of 17 studies bringing together nearly 530,000 men and women followed for 7 years shows that the risk of having a stroke is multiplied by 1.3 for people working more than 55 hours compared to a traditional weekly duration. .
A proportional association
The researchers point out that these results remained the same after taking into account risky behaviors such as smoking, alcohol consumption or lack of physical activity, and cardiovascular risk factors such as cholesterol and hypertension. . Moreover, none of these volunteers suffered from cardiac pathology at the start of the experiment.
Moreover, it seems that this association is proportional. The longer the weekly working time, the greater the risk. Thus, the authors calculated that for a person working between 41 and 48 hours per week, his risk of having a stroke increases by 10%, while working between 49 and 54 hours increases this risk by 27%.
“Pooling all the available studies has enabled us to explore the link between working time and cardiovascular disease risks with more precision than before,” says Mika Kivimäki, professor of epidemiology at University College London and responsible for this work. Healthcare professionals should be aware that working long hours is associated with an increased risk of stroke and possibly coronary heart disease as well ”.
1 in 10 French people concerned
For the moment, the authors do not have enough elements to explain the underlying mechanisms. However, they suggest that risky behaviors such as a sedentary lifestyle and heavy alcohol consumption could play a role. There is also chronic stress.
In a commentary accompanying this publication, Dr Urban Janlert of Umea University in Sweden recalls that long working days are common around the world. In fact, within OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) member countries, around 12% of men and 5% of women work more than 50 hours per week. Among them, Turkey is the state with the highest proportion of employees working more than 50 hours, against less than 1% of Dutch employees.
In France, less than one in 10 employees (8.7%) works more than 50 hours per week, while in Germany, a country where 35 hours are not applied, only 5.6% of employees do so.
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