Corps. should have all their managers tested with EBCT.
April 12, 1998
Managers Face Higher Risk of Heart
Attack Says Study
By SUSAN J. WELLS
Being a manager is tough work. Now, it turns out, it may pose a
serious and potentially deadly health risk, too.
Managers run twice the normal risk of heart attack the week after they
dismiss an employee or face a high-pressure deadline, according to a
medical study published last month in the journal Circulation.
Researchers interviewed almost 800 hospital patients between 1989 and
1994 who were employed at the time of their heart attacks -- asking them
specifically about the occurrence of four job-related events: working under a
high-pressure deadline; having to dismiss someone; getting a promotion or a
raise, and quitting or being laid off.
"Two situations came up as producing the strongest risk of heart attack --
having to fire someone and working under a high-pressure deadline," said
Murray Mittleman, an author of the study and a general internist at Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard University.
Stress, of course, has long been seen as a cause of health problems. And
earlier medical research has shown that the workplace can influence the
long-term risk of heart disease.
The Center for Corporate Health at Beth Israel Deaconess estimates that
60 percent to 90 percent of all medical office visits in the United States are
for stress-related disorders and that as much as 80 percent of all disease
and illness is initiated or aggravated by stress.
But this latest study, Mittleman said, is the first to focus on and to link
specific, brief events at work to heart attacks that can occur as many as
seven days later.
Companies often know that there is stress-related illness in the workplace,
but do not always know how to address it, researchers say.
"So much of our work mentality is warlike combat, us against them," said
Joseph Loizzo, a psychiatrist and director of the Center for Meditation and
Healing at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. "To
reduce stress, you really have to practice a unilateral disarmament of sorts
-- no matter what the company culture is -- by pulling back from the bad
feelings and arming yourself instead with psychic defenses."
These can include stress-management methods like meditation and
relaxation techniques or mental rehearsals of stressful situations.
Patricia Chapman, 55, an investment professional at a Fortune 100
high-technology company in Silicon Valley, knows the ill effects of stress
firsthand. Her physicians diagnosed cardiac arrhythmia in 1989, and she
was forced to take a four-month medical leave of absence in 1995 after her
condition was aggravated by the pressures of increased job responsibilities
and a divorce. Doctors had told her she was at risk for sudden death; her
heart was logging 700 extra beats an hour.
"Stress was literally killing me," she said. "I was really afraid I was going to
drop dead at work."
After years of medications and multiple surgeries offered mixed success,
Ms. Chapman took a new approach -- a series of new techniques taught by
Heart Math, a training and consulting company in Boulder Creek, Calif. In
some ways, the exercises resemble a child's "time out" for bad behavior, or
rebooting a computer to start over.
The idea is to quietly use positive thoughts to physically alter and calm the
heart's rhythm during stress -- in effect, telling the brain to decrease the
number of beats. Ms. Chapman, for example, thinks for several minutes of a
person she loves or of a sports activity she enjoys.
Heart Math said these visualization techniques have been used in employee
training programs at Motorola, Shell and Hewlett-Packard.
At Motorola, groups of employees were trained and observed for six
months. After the training, workers who had high blood pressure at the start
were no longer hypertensive and reported reductions in other physical signs
of stress, according to Heart Math research.
According to the most recent figures from the Department of Health and
Human Services, 37 percent of private companies with 50 or more
employees offered stress management training programs in 1992, up from
27 percent in 1985. And the figure may well be growing as a cottage
industry of medical consultants tries to meet the corporate demand.
The Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the
University of Massachusetts Medical Center has offered corporate
stress-reduction programs since 1996. Through an eight-week course, the
center teaches groups of employees how to "cultivate mindfulness" in
everyday life -- mostly through meditation and personal observation
techniques to focus on the present. It also instructs workers on how to react
less emotionally to stressful situations.
One corporate client is BASF Bioresearch in Worcester, Mass. "We're in a
very competitive field with drug development and research," said Pamela
Barney, human resources manager at BASF. "There's a fair amount of
stress to get products to market first."
Ms. Barney said the company plans to offer the classes regularly and is
studying their effectiveness. "We've had very positive feedback and results
so far," she said.
Many experts note, however, that on-the-job stress remains pervasive.
"The truth is," said Mittleman of Beth Israel, "we don't know whether
certain stress-management practices really will make a difference in
reducing death and disability from heart disease."
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