FRIDAY, Dec. 20, 2019 (HealthDay News) — The correlation between low education and incident cardiovascular disease (CVD) is partly due to income and work stress, according to a study published online Dec. 17 in the European Heart Journal.
Elisabeth Framke, Ph.D., from the National Research Center for the Working Environment in Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues used data from 1,638,270 individuals, who were free of cardiometabolic disease, to examine how income and work stress impact the correlations between education and CVD morbidity and mortality. A total of 41,944 individuals with cardiometabolic disease were included in mortality analyses.
A total of 51,585 and 24,075 incident CVD cases were identified during 10,957,399 and 10,776,516 person-years in men and women, respectively. The researchers found that the risk for CVD was 1.62 and 1.46 before and after adjustment for income and job strain (25 percent reduction) for men with low education. The corresponding estimates were 1.66 and 1.53 for women, respectively (21 percent reduction). A total of 1,736 men and 341 women died from CVD among individuals with cardiometabolic disease. In both sexes, education predicted CVD mortality. After adjustment for income and job strain, estimates were reduced by 54 percent in men and 33 percent in women.
“Low income and high job strain may play a role in how low educational level affects the risk of developing or dying from cardiovascular disease, but that also a considerable part of this association is independent of income and job strain,” Framke said in a statement.
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