On-the-Job Stress Won't Raise Your Risk for Cancer, Study Finds

The researchers defined several types of job stress: high-stress jobs, with high work demands and low control over work; active jobs, with high demands and high control; passive jobs, with low demands and low control; and low stress jobs, with low demands and high control.

The investigators then turned to cancer death registries and hospital records to see how many people developed or died from cancer. They further refined their search by taking age, sex, socioeconomic factors, smoking and alcohol use into account.

In addition, the researchers excluded anyone who was extremely overweight or underweight.

Over an average 12 years of follow-up, more than 5,700 people developed some type of cancer.

Heikkila's team didn't find any connection, however, between cancer and job stress. It is possible that other studies that found a connection between job stress and cancer found the association by chance or included other work-related factors that went beyond work, the Finnish researchers said.

For this type of study, called a meta-analysis, researchers comb through already published studies looking for patterns in the data. Often, the patterns they find go beyond the original intent of the studies they are examining.

The downside of a meta-analysis is that the data the researchers choose is only as good as the data in the studies they use, and their conclusions can't always take into account problems with the original research.

Elizabeth Ward, national vice president of intramural research at the American Cancer Society, said it is hard to conclude from this analysis that work stress doesn't play a role in cancer.

"One way job stress could impact cancer is if people who have stress are more prone to be smokers or drink more alcohol, or be obese," she explained.

When the researchers tried to eliminate these factors from their data, they could be hiding a substantial number of people for whom stress leads directly to behaviors known to increase the risk for cancer, Ward noted.

SOURCES: Katriina Heikkila, Ph.D., Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Helsinki; Lidia Schapira, M.D., associate editor, psychosocial oncology, Cancer.Net, American Society of Clinical Oncology, and assistant professor, department of medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston; Elizabeth Ward, Ph.D., national vice president, intramural research, American Cancer Society; Feb. 7, 2013, BMJ, online

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Published: February 2013