Bad bosses may damage your heart

Andrew Auty
Member - 17 posts

Before deciding what meaning to attach to the research paper, wouldn't it be a good idea to read it? Was the association corrected for trait? How strong was the association? Confidence limits? Other confounders assessed? Statistical power...

I see from your comment that you associate the report with injustice, poor communication skills, bullying, failure to follow procedure. Which of these was assessed in the research paper?

The next problem is deciding whether the apparent causal factors have a rational mechanism linking them to the harm observed. If they do, then there is a chance that eliminating the causal factors could improve outcomes. If they don't then the correct response remains uncertain. Thus far, stress research has been good at identifying associations, but interventions research based on countering these stressors have proved to be uninformative.

Looking forward to actually reading the paper.

Phill S
Member - 81 posts

Cathy Ross, cardiac nurse for the British Heart Foundation, said: ... "Feeling undervalued and unsupported can cause stress, which often leads to unhealthy behaviours such as smoking, eating a poor diet, drinking too much alcohol and not getting enough exercise - adding to your risk of developing heart problems.

"Being fit and active can give you the double benefit of busting work stress and boosting your heart health at the same time."

Although I do agree with what you say Andrew, the paper should be read first, I also know from experience that there are many many poor managers out there, Frankly it doesn't take a survey to reveal this to me, it just takes eyes and ears.

And no matter what the paper says, for companies that mis-manage the only thing that will change is the locks on the doors.

Nigel Dupree
Member - 51 posts

Dear Andrew, this research has just came to the same conclusions as a twenty years logitudenal study of Civil Servants completed by a UK university and whilst identifying 'injustice' as a stressor it is the stress cycle, the bodies well intentioned coping strategy, where escape is not an option, to try and develop a degree of tolerance prior to 'adaptation exhaustion' that results in the damage.

Distress, if unmitigated over time, WILL result in 'escape' with or without the subjects collaboration as an impaired immune system leads to disease and/or emotional stress will impair mental health and in either case the individual will become sufficiently ill not to be able to work.

So, any questioner needs to be asking not 'if' stress is a factor in any abnormal condition, but 'how much' of a role stress if playing as 75 < 90% of all disease counts stress as a direct or indirect cause....

Personality is also primary predictor in chicken and egg process of adaptation whether individuals coping strategies will include self-medication (alcohol, drugs, eating disorders) or other self-destructive behaviours or psycho-social impairment often associated with sleeping disorders compounding their ability to manage or maintain normal relationships.

Stress may be non-specific but nontheless continues to induce changes within an individual in response to demand that if unmitigated will result in early death as the ultimate escape where fight or flight have been excluded as survival options.

Andrew Auty
Member - 17 posts

Thank you both for these responses. It is clear that your understandings of stress are deeply rooted.

A person's understanding of stress contributes to self protection and at the same acts as a risk factor and as a maintaining factor. So, I dread to challenge the potential protective effect even if the goal was to allow the interrruption of an unhelpful risk or maintaining factor.

As for the UC research into civil servants, well there have been 16 or so high quality prospective studies on stress and heart disease. 7 find a weak link with objective heart disease but 6 of these were based on just this one cohort! The rest find no link (actually one sub category link was found).

The problem with the Whitehall studies is that the only solid conclusion was that low work status (seniority of rank) was a risk factor. Work status might correlate nicely with perceptions of the many different stressors that were proposed as hypotheses. But it might also correlate with dozens of other factors to do with wealth race gender...

Other researchers have established that the measures of stress used in the Whitehall study are not mutually exclusive i.e. they all tend to measure the same thing, but no-one has yet found out what that thing (unifying concept) is. There is good evidence that it is to do with relationships. The new research is at least consistent with that.

There are no succesful intervention studies based on any of the myriad ways of measuring stress. Promoting people to higher work status would be the obvious answer, but this might complicate the way work is organised!

I therefore regard the research literature as indicating on balance no causal link. I look forward to reading the new study.

Promoting the concept that stress causes heart disease might just be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Promting the concept that is doesn't cause heart disease might also be a risky choice. Given the state of the research evidence, any choice here is essentially a political one. Thank goodness the choice isn't mine to make.

I am glad of the certainties you espouse in your responses, but am unable to share them.

Nigel Dupree
Member - 51 posts

Andrew,
For sure back to nature / nurture or chicken and egg altho 'Brown' reports 75 < 90% of all disease counts stress as a direct or indirect cause and 'Selye' says that every disease has some element of stress adaptation so one has to wonder not IF but, HOW MUCH of a role stress is playing in the GAS (general adaption syndrome) ?

Personality style is also suggested as the most highly dependent variable and will, no doubt, manifest in the level of resilience an individual will present in the GAS process where 'escape' from stressor is not an option taken and adaptation follows as the organism's well-intentioned attempt to survive and tolerate stressor by reducing distress.

Nevertheless, if adaption reasonably successful this also tends to encourage the individual to persevere where the warning signs of distress are ignored in the end adaptive exhaustion (homeostatic response) results in shifts in chemistry, auto-immune problems, tissue structure or functional changes ending in disease - a mental or physiologically enforced 'escape'.

Of course, work/life stressors are not encountered in isolation and tend to be compounded across the work/life experience yet as the human psycho-physiology operates withing ranges that are relative to the internal environment of the individual, as life meets with one's genetic make up if stress were to be defined as a specific syndrome inducing non-specific changes within an organism in response to demand it may be taken more seriously in terms of foreseeable risk that requires reasonable prevention and/or mitigation.

Evolution may have provided an excellent survival startegy through the GAS process initially building a degree of resilience to stressors through using the fight/flight response to better separate the real from imagined alarm or threat yet it appears it has not enabled the system, when under strain, to recognise the difference in proportionality between "approval deprivation" in the workplace & preditor stalking one in the jungle shadows...............