Overtime work and incident coronary heart disease: The Whitehall II prospective cohort study

Aims To examine the association between overtime work and incident coronary heart disease (CHD) among middle-aged employees. Methods and results Six thousand and fourteen British civil servants (4262 men and 1752 women), aged 39–61 years who were free from CHD and worked full time at baseline (1991–1994), were followed until 2002–2004, an average of 11 years. The outcome measure was incident fatal CHD, clinically verified incident non-fatal myocardial infarction (MI), or definite angina (a total of 369 events). Cox proportional hazard models adjusted for sociodemographic characteristics showed that 3–4 h overtime work per day was associated with 1.60-fold (95 % CI 1.15–2.23) increased risk of inci-dent CHD compared with employees with no overtime work. Adjustment for all 21 cardiovascular risk factor