An article in last year's Journal of the American Medical Association reports that 292 women from Stockholm, Sweden were followed for nearly 5 years from the time they experienced either a heart attack or unstable angina pectoris, to see if work stress and/or relationship stress increased their risk of heart trouble (cardiac death, acute myocardial infarction or the need for other surgical repairs). Adjusting for intervening factors such as age, estrogen status, education, smoking, diagnosis, diabetes, triglicerides, and lipoproteins, the team of Orth-Gomer, Wamala, Horsten, Schenck-Gustafsson, Schneiderman and Mittleman found that marital stress increased the women's risk by nearly three times.
Work stress, on the other hand, did not significantly predict recurrent coronary events in women. Men, on the other hand, have been found by earlier studies to be adversely affected by work stress, suggesting that women's treatment programs need to be tailored more to the unique psychosocial needs of women.
The article: Marital Stress worsens prognosis in women with coronary heart disease: The Stockholm Female Coronary Risk Study, in JAMA 2000 Dec 20; 284 (23): pp. 3008-3014.
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