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High Level Job May Result in Longer Life
Excerpt
By Susan Church, HealthScoutNews
(HealthScoutNews)
-- The key to a longer life may be the one that opens the executive
suite.
Men and women
both live much longer if they're in a high-level job, one that
earns them $75,000 to $100,000, says a new study. In fact, 15
years of data on nearly 19,000 people showed that men in that
category had half the risk of dying as men in the general population.
Interestingly though, high-powered women in the study had only
38 percent of the risk of dying as other women.
Why didn't
high-level jobs seem to protect the women as much as the men when
the study subjects were all matched for age, pay scale and supervisory
role? Smoking's to blame, say the researchers.
"Men
benefit more than women from high-level employment, most likely
because the rate of cancer among men drops," says Kevin Kip,
assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh
and one of the authors of the study. "Our speculation is
that women in these upper echelons are smoking, maybe because
of the stress level of the job."
In a recent
report in the American Journal of Epidemiology, researchers
at the University of Pittsburgh and the National Center for Health
Statistics found that men in upper-level jobs in the federal government,
such as managers, doctors and engineers, ran a 40 percent higher
risk of dying during the 15 years of the study than women. That's
a much better percentage than men in general, who are 70 percent
more likely to die between ages 30 and 69 than women.
In the overall
population, women outlive men by about six years, thanks largely
to estrogen's ability to protect against heart disease.
The researchers
looked at the number of deaths among 18,908 civil service employees
-- those ranked at the General Schedule level of 14 and above
-- between 1979 and 1993 and compared those deaths with the overall
U.S. mortality rate.
Kip says
the findings didn't surprise him.
"We call
it the 'healthy worker effect. You have to be in fairly reasonable
health to work, so employed people are likely to live longer than
the general population, which includes people too sick to work.
People in virtually any occupation will do better than the general
public," Kip says.
The researchers
found 10 female federal employee deaths for every 14 male high-ranking
federal employee deaths, better than the ratio of 17 male deaths
to 10 female deaths in the general public.
While the
rate of heart disease was about equal between men and women, women
in the study were far more likely to die from cancer, especially
lung cancer and pulmonary diseases like emphysema, than the men.
"The
women in these jobs weren't getting stressed out and dying from
heart disease," Kip says. "But cancer is a different
story."
Women's risk
of lung cancer increases with age. One previous study of 1,000
men and women at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City
found that women smokers at age 60 have more than twice the risk
of lung cancer than male smokers the same age. Doctors aren't
sure why women's risk is higher. Other studies have found that
while smokers are typically scarce in prominent jobs, the female
executives who do smoke light up more frequently than their male
counterparts.
What To
Do:
Psychologist
Royda Crose, author of the book Why Women Live Longer than
Men, says women who climb the corporate ladder adopt competitive
attitudes that raise stress levels. She suggests they learn a
lesson from their fellow workers in the trenches -- that relationships
with friends, family and colleagues are just as important in upper
management as they are for anyone else.
For tips on
how to quit smoking, try the
American Lung Association.
Feeling a
little stressed by your job? You may find some help
here. This CBS HealthWatch report tells why
executives have less job stress than people lower on the company's
food chain.
Reference
Source 89
For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
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Prevention Resources".
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