Long work hours can lead to high blood pressure

PanARMENIAN.Net - Putting in overtime at the office could get you a promotion, but it could also lead to something less desirable: high blood pressure, CBS News reports.

Working 49 or more hours per week is linked to a 66% higher chance of getting hypertension, according to an American Heart Association study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. There's an even greater likelihood of developing "masked hypertension," a condition that often goes undetected during routine doctor's visits, researchers found.

Meanwhile, it's not only workers burning the midnight oil who are at higher risk. Even working as few as 41 hours a week, only an hour longer than the typical workweek, raised the risk of high blood pressure.

In the study, researchers tracked more than 3,500 white-collar employees at three public institutions in Quebec over a five-year period. Participants wore blood-pressure monitoring devices that took regular readings, while researchers controlled for factors including people's age, gender, education, occupation, smoking status, body mass index, level of job stress and other variables.

Both ordinary hypertension and masked hypertension put patients at a higher risk for cardiovascular disease, according to Xavier Trudel, the lead author of the study. Other factors beyond the scope of the study, such as family duties, also could play a role in affecting workers' blood pressure, he said.