Working overtime raises risk of heart disease by 80%: Study

You might want to cut down on the overtime!

Working more than eight hours a day raises the risk of heart disease by 80 per cent, a new major study has claimed.

Scientists found that long working hours could be condemning thousands of employees to heart attacks and strokes, the Daily Mail reported.

The warning follows the analysis of 12 studies dating back as far as 1958, involving a total of 22,000 people from around the world.

Researchers at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health found that people, whose working days were longer than the traditional eight hours, had a 40 to 80 per cent greater chance of heart disease.

The size of the increase varied depending on how each study was carried out. The effects were more pronounced when participants were asked how long they worked for — but when researchers closely monitored working hours, the increased risk of heart disease was closer to 40 per cent.

Lead researcher Marianna Virtanen said the effects could be due to ‘prolonged exposure to stress’. Other triggers could be poor eating habits and lack of exercise due to restricted leisure time.

The same team, in 2009, discovered that long working hours increased the risk of dementia later in life. The effect was similar in magnitude to that of smoking.

Middle-aged workers putting in 55 hours or more a week had poorer brain function than those clocking up no more than 40 hours, with lower scores on tests to measure intelligence, short-term memory and word recall.

The study estimated that millions of people worked unpaid extra hours to hang on to their jobs, but the long-term toll on workers’ health could be devastating.

“There are several potential mechanisms that may underlie the association between long working hours and heart disease,” Virtanen said in the report.

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