An Analysis of the Association Between Work Stress and Health Behaviours in Korean and Japanese Ageing Studies: a Cross-sectional Study

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Work stress is a risk factor that may be partially responsible for increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. One of the proposed pathways is through unhealthy behaviours. As limited research has focused on the association between work stress and health behaviours in Asian countries, this research aims to explore the effect of work stress on the two health behaviours among employees aged 45 or above in Korea and Japan.Methods: This cross-sectional study based on baseline data from the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (KLoSA,2006) and Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR,2007&2009) used logistic regression and multinomial logistic regression to investigate the association between work stress represented by the short version of the effort-reward imbalance (ERI) model and smoking (binary current smoking) and drinking (categorical volume of alcohol). In addition, the statistical power was over 80% for odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1.3 in Korea and 1.6 in Japan. Moreover, this research additionally examines the potential interaction between ERI and gender.Results: Smoking and drinking were significantly associated with the ER ratio in the Korean analysis (N=3,478). After the model was fully adjusted, the OR (95% CI) and RRR (95% CI) were 1.45 (1.17-1.80) and 1.43 (1.09-1.90), respectively. In Japan (N=1,504), smoking was associated with the ER ratio (OR 1.37 (1.00-1.87)); however, drinking was not. No statistically significant interaction was found between ERI and gender (p value of 0.82 in Korea and 0.19 in Japan).Conclusions: The results of this study showed that work stress was statistically significantly associated with both health behaviours in the Korean sample and with smoking in Japan. These results potentially suggest the integration of long working time reduction health promotion programmes in these two Asian countries.