Latest developments in stress week ending 11 March 2005

HSE focuses on key sectors to reduce stress
The HSE is undertaking a nationwide programme of workshops to help employers learn how to implement its new Management Standards on stress. Following the launch of the guidelines in November 2004, it is spending 18 months helping five sectors in particular - finance, health, education and local and central government - to implement best practice in stress prevention and management. The HSE says the main contributors to stress include staff not being able to cope with the demands put upon them; employees having too little control over the way they do their work; lack of support; conflict or bullying; conflicting job roles or lack of understanding regarding roles; and lack of consultation at times of change within the organisation.

Key findings of the Fourth International Conference on Work Environment and Cardiovascular Diseases
Among the key findings presented at the conference are that:
· Working longer hours leads to higher hypertension rates in Americans. Previous studies in Japan have shown that people who work more than 40 hours a week have a higher rate of hypertension, the precursor to cardiovascular disease. Haiou Yang and colleagues with the UCI Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health tested this idea with Californian workers between the ages of 18 and 64. They found that people who worked 50 hours a week or more were 13% more likely to report hypertension than people who work less than 40 hours a week.
· Job pressure raises blood pressure all day, all night. Heather Spence Laschinger and Joan Finegan of the University of Western Ontario have identified how job stress levels can be a predictor of burnout rate among nurses. In a study observing 192 nurses, they identified how high psychological demands and low levels of decision-making authority are directly related to work effectiveness and ultimately job burnout. The researchers also discovered that job strain was significantly related to nurses' physical and mental health.
· Job stress makes stopping smoking harder, especially for men. While a stressful job has links to cardiovascular disease, it can also make giving up smoking harder. This is what Francoise Leynen at the Département d'Epidémiologie et de Promotion à la Santé - Ecole de Santé Publique, Université Libre de Bruxelles - in Belgium and colleagues discovered in a survey of 2,821 people from nine companies. Workers who have jobs with high stress and little decision-making authority are less likely to stop smoking, regardless of their socio-economic level and intensity of smoking; and male smokers have an even harder time giving up.

Poor lose out in campaign to combat heart disease
The NHS must do more to address heart disease in the poorest communities, where high levels of smoking and obesity mean people are at the greatest risk of dying from it, says the Healthcare Commission. A study of NHS heart services found that while much has been achieved - with 85% of heart attack sufferers receiving life-saving drugs within 30 minutes of reaching hospital, or within an hour of their first call for help (compared to 59% two years ago) - there is still some way to go. Risk factors for heart disease such as obesity and smoking are on the increase, especially in deprived communities where people are more likely to smoke and eat a diet high in saturated fats. Work to address this is patchy – with few examples of services specifically designed to help with obesity, and little evidence that services to help people stop smoking give the long-term support they need to stay off cigarettes.

Girls aged six ‘unhappy with weight’
According to new research published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, by the age of six, most girls are dissatisfied with their bodies and want to be thinner, and almost half believe they need to go on a diet to lose weight. “Previously, research has focused on adolescence as the likely time for the emergence of body dissatisfaction,” said one of the report’s authors, Hayley Dohnt from Flinders University, South Australia. “But clear evidence has accumulated that a substantial number of pre-adolescent girls are dissatisfied with their bodies and wish to be thinner.” The researchers also found the girls had little concept of body dissatisfaction when they arrived in their reception class at the age of five – suggesting peer pressure at school as a major source of the problem.

Heart benefits of laughter
A good laugh may have repercussions all the way to your heart. For the first time, researchers have found that laughter causes the endothelium - the inner lining of blood vessels - to dilate. This increases blood flow which, of course, is good for overall cardiovascular health. Although this is the first study to show that laughter has such an effect, Dr. Michael Miller, director of preventive cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Centre, who led the study, had previously reported that people with heart disease generally responded to everyday life events with less humour than people who were healthy. And Harvard University researchers have reported that people with an optimistic outlook also have a reduced risk of heart disease. Almost all the volunteers in the Maryland study (95%) experienced increased blood flow while watching a funny film, whereas 74% had decreased flow while observing images of war. Overall, average blood flow increased 22% while laughing and decreased 35% during mental stress, and the magnitude of the changes was similar to the benefit that might be seen with aerobic activity.

Hope for sufferers as diabetic is ‘cured’
Doctors have claimed a breakthrough in the treatment of diabetes after announcing the first British patient to be ‘cured’ by transplant. Richard Lane, 61, was having five insulin injections a day to control the diabetes from which he has suffered for almost three decades. But after three transplants of islet cells (the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas) from three separate donors, he no longer needs injections to control the condition and is leading a normal life. Doctors at King's College Hospital in London, who performed the transplant, said it heralded a new era for the 250,000 patients with Type 1 diabetes like Mr Lane's, who are dependent on daily insulin injections. An estimated 15% of patients with Type 1 diabetes who have uncontrolled hypoglycaemia could be eligible for the procedure at its present stage of development, specialists said.