People who work long hours have an increased risk of developing an irregular heart rhythm known as atrial fibrillation, according to a study of nearly 85,500 men and women published in the European Heart Journal.
A recent Europeamn study conducted by professors from the Department of Epidemiology at University College London (UK) has showed that, compared to people who worked a normal week of between 35-40 hours, those who worked 55 hours or more were approximately 40 per cent more likely to develop atrial fibrillation during the following ten years. For every 1000 people in the study, an extra 5.2 cases of atrial fibrillation occurred among those working long hours during the ten-year follow-up.
Lead researcher Professor Mika Kivimaki and her colleagues analysed data from 85,494 men and women from the UK, Denmark, Sweden and Finland who took part in one of eight studies in these countries. They assessed the participants’ working hours when they joined the studies between 1991 and 2004. Working hours were classified as less than 35 hours a week, 35-40 hours, which was considered as the standard working hours of full-time workers, 41 to 48 hours, 49 to 54 hours, and 55 hours or more a week. None of the participants had atrial fibrillation at the start of the studies.
“These findings show that long working hours are associated with an increased risk of atrial fibrillation, the most common cardiac arrhythmia. This could be one of the mechanisms that explain the previously observed increased risk of stroke among those working long hours. Atrial fibrillation is known to contribute to the development of stroke, but also other adverse health outcomes, such as heart failure and stroke-related dementia,” says Prof Kivimaki.
During the ten-year follow-up period, there were 1061 new cases of atrial fibrillation. This gave an incidence rate of 12.4 per 1000 people in the study, but among the 4,484 people working 55 hours or more, the incidence was 17.6 per 1000. “Those who worked long hours had a 1.4 times higher risk of developing atrial fibrillation, even after we had adjusted for factors that could affect the risk, such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, obesity, leisure time physical activity, smoking and risky alcohol use,” says Prof Kivimaki.
Nine out of ten of the atrial fibrillation cases occurred in people who were free of pre-existing or concurrent cardiovascular disease, which suggests the increased risk is likely to reflect the effect of long working hours rather than the effect of any pre-existing or concurrent cardiovascular disease.
The study did have some limitations, including the fact that working hours were only assessed once at the beginning of the study and that the type of job (for instance, whether it involved working night shifts) was not recorded.
However, Prof Kivimaki said: “The great strength of our study was its size, with nearly 85,000 participants, which makes it large by the standard of any study in this field. Obviously, monitoring of working hours over several years would be more ideal than a one-off measurement at the start of the study. However, I do not think the results would have been dramatically different with repeat measurements of working hours because people tend to keep their working patterns. In the current absence of trials with atrial fibrillation as the primary outcome in the general population, findings from observational studies such as this are particularly important in offering insights into the lifestyle determinants of this condition.”
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