Workaholics drink more

Scientists claim that every extra hour of work
increases the number of overturned cups

Grigory Kolpakov, "Newspaper.Ru"

Workaholics are more likely to become alcoholics than people who prefer a more moderate pace of work. A group of Finnish researchers made this remarkable conclusion after going through all the available scientific literature.

Scientists led by Dr. Marianna Virtanen from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Hygiene in Helsinki have convincingly proved that the more time a person spends in the workplace, the more likely he is to drink alcohol in excess of the safe limits established by medicine.

They published a report about their research in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal on Wednesday night, Moscow time.

It cannot be said that Dr. Virtanen's group was the first to find a connection between the length of the working day and the number of glasses drunk during the week. But, figuratively speaking, they did not invent the bicycle, but were the first to assemble this bicycle.

The authors mention several "preliminary" works at once, as they call them, where the relationship between the number of working hours per week and alcohol consumption was investigated, but the results of these studies, in their opinion, did not differ in particular statistical reliability, and their conclusions sometimes contradicted each other.

The Helsinki team, which also included scientists from Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain and other countries, following a verified standard methodology, managed to find all the works and all the databases where "working hours", "processing", "alcohol", etc. were mentioned, selected trustworthy ones from them and published in refereed journals, and then she subjected the resulting array to two different types of statistical analysis – the so-called cross-sectional and prospective (or predictive) analyses.

In the first case (when different samples are made from the data array, for example by country or age of participants), they analyzed 313,693 people from 14 countries and found that an increase in the number of working hours per week leads to an increase in alcohol consumption by 11%.

Another technique – a perspective analysis that allows you to track changes over time – led to almost the same results: after examining 100,602 people from 9 different countries with its help, they found that compared to people working 35-40 hours a week, those who work 49-54 hours have 13% there are more chances to get into the risk group and earn alcohol addiction with all its possible problems such as diabetes, cirrhosis, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, mental disorders, etc.

The authors remind that this group includes women who consume more than 14 standard doses of alcohol, or "drinks", per week (one "drink" is 14 g of pure alcohol, about 40 g of vodka, a 125 g glass of wine or a small beer with a volume of 0.33 liters), and men who exceed a weekly dose of 21 drink.

Curiously, according to this analysis, people who work 55 hours a week or more are at slightly lower alcohol risk: for them, these chances decrease slightly, from 13 to 12%.

The Finnish study does not explain the reasons for this decrease, but most likely, either with such a load alcohol does not allow them to work fully (problems with attention, memory, behavior), or a seriously deteriorated state of health forces them to reduce doses.

Marianna Virtanen explains the increase in the amount of alcohol with an increase in the number of working hours by the desire to relieve excessive work stress. Judging by the work of her group in recent years, she is not at all enthusiastic about long working days. She proved that every extra hour of work over the norm increases the likelihood of depression, that an 11-hour working day can lead to heart problems, brain malfunction and generally cause stupefaction. Now, when she turned her attention to alcohol, it turns out that all these troubles are not only caused by hard work, but also aggravated by their relaxing antidote – alcohol.

According to the authors of the article, their findings confirm the correctness of the European Union directive on working hours, requiring that their number should not exceed 48 hours per week.

Many, however, do not follow this directive. For example, high-ranking managers or professionals who are eager for career growth or high incomes, often do not count these hours at all.

It is also interesting that the results obtained by the Finnish group are the same for all groups: they do not depend on gender, age, or social status. Everyone removes their work stress in the same way in the same proportions.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru15.01.2015