Need a good medical excuse to shave off some extra hours from your work week? Then tell your boss about a new study published yesterday in the Annals of Internal Medicine that finds people who work 11 hours or more per day have a 66 percent increased risk for coronary heart disease (CHD) compared to individuals working seven to eight hours daily. Researchers from the University College London recruited 7,095 full-time working adults between 1991 and 1993 and measured their baseline Framingham score, a risk assessment tool that uses information from the Framingham Heart Study to predict the risk of heart attack or death from coronary disease in the next ten years. On average, the study group was followed over a 12-year period, during which 192 new cases of CHD were reported.
The study findings, however, are only applicable to low-risk, employed populations, and lead author Mika Kivimaki says it’s not obvious whether long working days cause an increased risk for CHD or simply serve as a marker to predict its risk.
Though ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross points out that this is an observational study, which is often less dependable, he does concede that the Framingham risk model is generally reliable, and “when following over seven thousand adults for more than 12 years, you can’t dismiss these results out of hand.”
