Women More Likely to Suffer Heart Attacks from Stressful Jobs

As more and more women are beginning to make their way into high-stress, high-demand, high-pay jobs, a worrying trend is beginning to emerge, investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard Medical School (HMS) explain.

They say that these females are more likely than their peers to suffer a stress-induced heart attack. Previous studies had only observed this association between stress and adverse cardiac events in men, and no data existed to substantiate a similar claim in women, PsychCentral reports.

In a paper published in the latest issue of the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, researchers say that high stress and job strain make women 67 percent more likely to have a heart attack than their peers in lesser jobs.

Women in this group are also 38 percent more likely to experience other cardiovascular events, less severe than heart attacks. The work covered records belonging to more than 22,000 US health professionals in the United States.