Work Stress Could Raise Stroke Risk: Study

Think your stressful job is bad for your health?

For 10 percent of you, that might be the case -- particularly when it comes to stroke risk.

A new study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine shows that psychological stress from work could raise stroke risk by 1.4 times among middle- and high-class men, MyHealthNewsDaily reported. Calculated out, that means about 10 percent of strokes in the study can be attributed to mental stress from work.

"Regular psychological work pressure is a highly prevalent and independent risk factor for stroke among men in higher social classes," researchers wrote in the study.

However, researchers did not find a link between work stress and stroke among men in lower social classes, according to the study.

Researchers analyzed health information from 5,000 men ages 40 to 59 who lived in Copenhagen and were followed for 30 years, MyHealthNewsDaily reported.

This is certainly not the first study to link work stress with stroke risk. A Swedish study in the journal BMC Medicine shows that people who are urgently admitted to a hospital after suffering a stroke report being stressed for a prolonged period of time before their stroke.

"There appears to be a correlation between stress and stroke, but this needs to be interpreted with great caution," study researcher Katarina Jood, who is a researcher at the Sahlgrenska Academy and a neurologist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, said in a statement. "We asked about self-perceived stress among the stroke patients, and there is, of course, a risk of patients who have just had a cerebral infarction remembering incorrectly or over-interpreting with regard to their level of stress."

A study earlier this year in the journal BMC Public Health showed that work stress might affect other areas of health, too. That study, conducted by researchers from Concordia University, showed that people with high-stress jobs see doctors more often than people in low-stress jobs.