Stress and Your Heart
A recent article appeared on MSN.com, originally posted on Caring.com about stress and your heart. The article is entitled: “Is Stress Sabotaging Your Heart”? It reviews two recent studies looking at work-stress and hours worked and heart health and the sort answer to the title/question is a resounding “YES.”
Take a look and see: Click Here
No surprise, as stress has been known to be an independent risk factor for heart disease for quite some time. Back in the late 1980′s and 1990′s, stress and heart disease were first linked using descriptions of the “Type A personality”. Individuals, it was thought, who were hard driving, competitive and goal oriented were found to have a higher risk and rate of heart disease. Later, researches found that one component of the Type A personality was largely responsible for the increased risk: hostility or unexpressed anger. Still later, a study I had the privilege of being involved in documented for the first time that stress was also an independent risk factor in heart disease. That study found that increased stress was not only associated with increase heart disease risk but with increased health care costs as well.
What these new reports tell us is that stress specific to work is yet another aspect of stress that we as individuals need to attend to. In the bigger picture, it is anther deadly reason for employers to attend to work-place stress. As productivity demands increase and as health care costs continue to soar, we can’t afford to ignore stress.