Working Long and Hard May Heighten Diabetes Risk
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iStock/Thinkstock(LONDON) — Working 55 hours or more a week can heighten the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a new study.
However, lead author Mika Kivimaki from the University College London says the risk is much greater for people who do manual labor or other so-called “low socioeconomic status jobs.”
Without establishing a cause-and-effect relationship, Kivimaki’s research team determined that individuals in these lower-income professions who work 55 hours or more are 30 percent more likely to contract type 2 diabetes than people who only put in 35 to 40 hours weekly.
These findings were made from evaluating 222,000 workers over an average of 7.6 years from the U.S., Europe, Japan and Australia.
Kivimaki’s surmised that laborers who worked the longer hours may be more susceptible to diabetes because they tend not to exercise and have a hard time both relaxing and sleeping.
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