Unfair treatment may increase heart risk: study
Last Updated: Tuesday, May 15, 2007 | 6:01 PM ET
CBC News
People who feel they are being treated unfairly may be at higher risk of having a heart attack, a British study suggests.
Researchers studied more than 8,000 senior civil servants in London, asking them about their perceptions of injustice at home, work and in the community. Their physical and mental health was tracked for almost 11 years on average.
People who reported a high level of unfair treatment on a scale of one to six were 55 per cent more likely to have serious heart disease compared with those who did not feel unfairly treated, after adjusting for traditional heart disease risk factors, age, gender, chronic job stress and personality traits such as hostility.
"Unfairness is an independent predictor of increased coronary events and impaired health functioning," Roberto de Vogli of the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London and his colleagues wrote in the June issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
"Policies that promote fairness in the workplace, and also in other social settings (e.g., family, community and society) are likely to result in improvements in health," the journal said.
Almost 2,700 people reported moderate or high levels of unfairness. Of this group, 64 out of 966 in the low category of unfairness had a heart attack or angina, compared with 98 out of 1,368 in the moderate group, and 51 out of 567 in the high category.
Unfairness was also linked to significantly higher levels of poor physical and mental health at follow up, the researchers found.
"Further research is needed to disentangle the effects of unfairness from other psychosocial constructs and to investigate the societal, relational and biological mechanisms that may underlie its associations with health and heart disease," the team said.
It could be that unfair treatment is a stress factor that harms health. Some potential biological explanations include development of insulin resistance, disturbances in coagulation and inflammatory and immune responses, the researchers suggested.
Some reported limitations of the study included using self-reports of unfairness rather than an objective measure, incomplete samples when making statistical adjustments, and the exclusion of blue-collar workers.
