Long work hours can raise the diabetes risk in women

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Women who work 45 hours or more a week may be associated with nearly 70 per cent increased risk of diabetes as compared to men or women who worked for 30 to 40 hours a week, a study has found. Working long hours can have detrimental effects on health- from increased stress to higher rates of certain chronic diseases.

Men who worked more hours tended to have a slightly lower risk of incident diabetes, although this wasn't statistically significant. The Canadian study on 7,065 workers is the first to look at the impact of working hours on diabetes risk in substantial hours, including both genders.
While it is an observational study, the researchers noted, that the reason may be because women might work longer hours when all the household chores and family responsibilities are taken into account, the researchers said. In the study, published in BMJ Diabetes Research & Care, they report that women working more than 45 hours a week had a 51% higher risk of developing diabetes during the study period compared to women working 35 to 40 hours a week.
"The deleterious effect of long work hours observed among women of this study was robust to adjustment for sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics, other work-related exposures, and health conditions including hypertension, arthritis, and anxiety symptoms," the authors explained.
Lead researcher Dr Mahee Gilbert-Ouimet said it seems to boil down to the fact that female workers still tend to take on the bulk of running their household outside of the office."Considering the rapid and substantial increase of diabetes prevalence worldwide, identifying modifiable risk factors such as long work hours is of major importance to improve prevention and orient policy making, as it could prevent numerous cases of diabetes and diabetes-relatedhttps://www.indiatvnews.com/lifestyle/health-diabetes-signs-and-symptoms-weight-loss-neck-skin-turning-darker-black-underarms-fatigue-for-women-health-story-increased-hunger-eating-450801 chronic diseases," said the team including Mahee Gilbert-Ouimet from the Research Center of the Quebec University Hospital -- Laval University, in Canada.
“I was surprised to see the somewhat protective effect of longer working hours among men,” says Gilbert-Ouimet. “Among women, we know women tend to assume a lot of family chores and responsibilities outside the workplace, so one can assume that working long hours on top of that can have an adverse effect on health.”
The researchers defined incident diabetes as a hospital admission where a diagnosis of diabetes was given or two-physician service claims with a diabetes diagnosis occurring within 2 years of each other. Globally, the rate of diabetes among adults is expected to soar 50 per cent by 2030 to 439 million.