This release is available in French. Montreal, August 25, 2011
Job-related stress is catching up with the Canadians. A new
study by Concordia University economists, published in BMC
Public Health, has found that increased job stress causes
workers to increasingly seek help from health professionals for
physical, mental and emotional ailments linked to job stress.
Indeed, the number of visits to healthcare professionals is up
to 26 per cent for workers in high stress jobs. "These results
show that people in medium-to-high stress jobs visit family
doctors and specialists more often than workers with low job
stress," says first author Sunday Azagba, a PhD candidate in the
Concordia Department of Economics. To reach their conclusions,
the economists crunched nationally representative data from the
Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS). All NPHS
figures were restricted to adults aged 18 to 65 years the bulk
of the labour force and included statistics on the number of
healthcare visits, chronic illnesse