Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 11, 1990 TAG: 9004110515
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Medium
The changes were noted in male workers in New York City ranging from garbage collectors to stockbrokers.
The findings, based on an ongoing study of 215 men from 30 to 60 years old, are reported in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.
Job strain resulted when workers felt they faced high psychological demands without having much control over day-to-day decisions, said Dr. Peter Schnall, lead researcher at Cornell University Medical College in New York.
Twenty-one percent of the subjects suffered job strain. They faced up to three times greater risk of having high blood pressure than those who did not experience job strain, said Carl Pieper, a Cornell statistician.
All men ages 30 to 40 with high-stress jobs had a "clinically significant" thickening of the heart's left ventricle, or chamber, a condition that often precedes coronary disease and heart attacks, Pieper said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Their heart muscles were an average of 20 grams bigger than those without job stress, a substantial difference but still within normal range, Schnall said by telephone Tuesday.
"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a psychosocial variable based on job characteristics has been found to be related to both hypertension and anatomic increases in heart mass," the researchers wrote.
"If our model is correct, job situations where the level of work demands exceeds the individual's ability to control or deal with those demands creates a challenge that activates the sympathetic nervous system and leads to an elevation of blood pressure at work.
"Long-term exposure [over years] to job strain is hypothesized to ultimately result in a sustained elevation of blood pressure that then causes structural change in the cardiovascular system," they wrote.
While the notion that psychological factors can physically affect the body is not new, it is viewed with skepticism by some medical authorities, Dr. Redford Williams of Duke University Medical Center said in an accompanying editorial.
"If these results are considered along with the growing contributions of neuroscience to our understanding of how the brain speaks to the body's organs, perhaps the idea that the brain plays a role in physical disease will soon seem less `revolutionary' and more like `normal science,' " Williams said.
The authors concluded that job strain was "significantly related" to high blood pressure and increased heart mass after adjusting for factors such as age, alcohol intake and smoking.
by CNB