Study Links Working Overtime to Increased Risk of Stroke

Working overtime could be good for your career but it is not good for your health.

In a new study, researchers from University College London analyzed the results from 17 studies that included around 530,000 men and women from Europe, the United States and Australia. The team wanted to examine the effects of putting in more hours of work on one's overall wellbeing.

The team found that people who worked more had a higher risk of stroke in comparison to people who did not stay late at the office. Specifically, people who worked 41 to 48 hours per week had a 10 percent greater chance of suffering from a stroke than people who worked the normal schedule of 35 to 40 hours per week. The researchers added that people who worked 49 to 54 hours a week had a 27 percent increased risk of stroke while people who worked even more than that had a 33 percent increased risk.

"Long working hours are not a negligible occurrence," Urban Janlert, a researcher from the Umea University in Sweden wrote in a commentary reported by the Washington Post. "Essentially, if long working hours present a danger to health, it should be possible to change them, which is not always the case with other work environmental factors."

The researchers had controlled several factors such as smoking, alcohol intake and physical activity.

"The pooling of all available studies on this stoic allowed us to investigate the association between working hours and cardiovascular risk with greater precision than has previously been possible," study author, Mika Kivimaki said in a statement.

Kivimaki and her colleagues also discovered a link between working overtime and risk of coronary heart disease. They found that people who worked more than 55 hours a week were 13 percent more likely to receive a new heart disease diagnosis and hospitalization or death from heart disease.

The study was published in the journal, The Lancet.