A prospective study of job strain and coronary heart
disease in US women.
Lee S, Colditz G, Berkman L, Kawachi I.
Departments of Health and Social Behavior, Harvard
School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
BACKGROUND: Previous studies of job strain and coronary
heart disease (CHD) in men have established job strain as a predictor
of CHD risk. Despite the wealth of convincing evidence in men
for an association between job strain and CHD, data in women remain
sparse. METHODS: We prospectively evaluated the relation between
job strain and CHD risk in the Nurses' Health Study. In this analysis,
we followed a sample of 35 038 US female nurses aged 46-71 years,
who completed questions about job strain in 1992 and who were
free of diagnosed CHD, stroke, and cancer at baseline. The main
outcome measure was the incidence of CHD occurring between baseline
(1 June 1992) and 31 May 1996. RESULTS: During 4 years of follow-up,
we documented 146 incident cases of CHD (108 non-fatal cases of
myocardial infarction and 38 CHD deaths). No evidence was found
for a relationship between job strain and risk of CHD. In multivariate
analyses controlling for age, smoking, alcohol intake, body mass
index, history of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and other covariates,
women in high strain jobs did not have an increased risk of CHD
(relative risk [RR] = 0.71, 95% CI: 0.42-1.19) compared with women
in low strain jobs. Neither women in passive jobs (RR = 1.08,
95% CI: 0.69-1.68) nor those in active jobs (RR = 0.91, 95% CI:
0.54-1.53) had an increased risk of CHD. CONCLUSIONS: Job strain
was not related to an increase in the incidence of CHD in the
present cohort of nurses.
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