USA Today (11/20, Hellmich) reports, “People who are jobless at some point during their lifetime because they were laid off, fired or quit may be at an increased risk of having a heart attack after age 50,” according to a study published online in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The AP (11/20, Tanner) reports that investigators “analyzed data on more than 13,000 men and women aged 51 to 75 taking part in an ongoing health and retirement survey partly sponsored by the National Institute on Aging.” For the past 20 years, “participants have been interviewed every two years about their employment and health.” Altogether “there were 1,061 heart attacks during the study.”
The Los Angeles Times (11/19, Bardin) “Booster Shots” blog reports that the investigators “found that being unemployed was associated with a significantly increased risk of heart attack, with such subjects having heart attacks at 1.35 times the rate as people who were not unemployed.” The researchers also found that “each time somebody lost a job, their risk went up: People who had lost four jobs during the study had heart attacks at 1.63 times the rate of those who did not lose a job.”
Related Links:
— “Study: Unemployment may raise risk of heart attack,”Nanci Hellmich, USA Today, November 19, 2012.