UCL study: Overtime ’bad for your heart’

Working overtime is bad for the heart according to the results from a long-running UCL-led study of more than 10,000 civil servants in London. The research, published online today in the European Heart Journal , found that, compared with people who did not work overtime, people who worked three or more hours longer than a normal, seven-hour day had a 60% higher risk of heart-related problems such as death due to heart disease, non-fatal heart attacks and angina. Dr Marianna Virtanen, an epidemiologist at UCL and the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, said: ?The association between long hours and coronary heart disease was independent of a range of risk factors that we measured at the start of the study, such as smoking, being overweight, or having high cholesterol. ?Our findings suggest a link between working long hours and increased CHD [coronary heart disease] risk, but more research is needed before we can be confident that overtime work would cause CHD. In addition, we need more research on other health outcomes, such as depression and type 2 diabetes. The Whitehall II study started in 1985 and recruited 10,308 office staff aged 35 ? 55 from 20 London-based civil service departments. Data has been collected at regular intervals and in the third phase, between 1991 and 1994, a question on working hours was introduced.