The association between work stress and inflammatory biomarkers in Jordanian male workers

The study aimed to establish the association of work stress, expressed as effort-reward imbalance (ERI), and C-reactive protein (CRP) in 152 healthy Jordanian male employees. Self-report work stress, anthropometric data, and blood for CRP analysis were collected. A significant correlation between ERI and CRP (r = 0.29, p < .01), and between waist circumference with CRP (r = 0.44, p < .01) was found. Central obesity explained most of the variance in CRP after controlling for various covariates, and ERI was not a significant predictor of CRP (ΔR2 = 0.02; β = 0.15, p = .052). However, when only the centrally obese group was considered, ERI accounted for 5.0% of the variability in the CRP (β = 0.24, p < .05). Results of this study confirm previous findings that obesity is significantly associated with CRP, and support the notion that higher ERI amongst obese workers is one small but significant predictor of increased levels of CRP