Recent research conducted in the US has revealed a link between heart-failure and job-loss with some researchers claiming that it can cause a physical trauma as acute as the adverse-effects of smoking. Whilst there has always been an assumption that both work-related strains and unemployment can be a significant source of strain and anxiety, its effects are having an increasingly detrimental impact upon millions of Americans.
The research has been carried out by Matthew E Dupre and his team at Duke University in the USA. The study examined the links between certain aspects of unemployment and the risk of heart-disease with a sample of 13,451 adult Americans between the ages of 51 and 75. The research was conducted between 1992 and 2010, and follow up interviews were undertaken every two years. The study identified several factors relating to past and present employment that can lead to the onset of cardiovascular events, as revealed by Dupre:
“Although the risks for AMI were most significant in the first year after job loss, unemployment status, cumulative number of job losses and cumulative time unemployed were each independently associated with increased risk for AMI,” the researchers asserted.
Crucially, the research revealed that the greater people experienced job-loss, the higher their risk was in experiencing a major, cardiac-event, such as a heart-attack – with the risk of illness being increased during the first 12 months of unemployment. The propensity for experiencing post job-loss heart-problems was considered to be at-least equal to other chronic conditions caused by factors such as diabetes, smoking and high-blood pressure.
The research team has emphasized the need to conduct more studies dedicated to the subject, and believe that further research is crucial during a period of economic uncertainty, which is regularly causing redundancies and mass lay-offs.
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