WEDNESDAY, April 24, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Choosing to become a Mr. Mom can be a heartbreaking decision. Literally.
New research presented today at an American Heart Association forum in Honolulu found that househusbands had a death rate from heart disease that was 82 percent higher than men who worked outside the home.
Lead researcher Elaine D. Eaker also found that women in high-pressure jobs -- such as corporate executives -- were at almost three times the risk of death from heart disease as other women.
There's one caveat, says Eaker, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist: The data she used to reach her findings are 20 years old. The sea change in sex roles in the last two decades may have left that data, well, dated. Then again, maybe not, she says.
Her conclusion: It's not the stress you're under, it's what society expects you to be doing.
The stressed male executive with a prestigious position has a significantly lower-than-average risk of heart disease, while a woman in the same position has an unusually high risk. And the stay-at-home Dad is particularly vulnerable to dying from heart disease, she says.
"What we found was that the concept of job strain does not predict heart disease and death in men," Eaker says. "This was an unexpected finding. It is the opposite of what we expected."
Eaker based her findings on analyzing data from the Framingham Offspring study. The study includes individuals who are descendants of the people who participated in the classic Framingham Heart Study, which began in 1948.
More than 3,600 men and women in the offspring study completed psychological surveys and were followed for 10 years. They listed individual socioeconomic factors including income, education, marital status and employment. Eaker and her colleagues then used a standard, widely tested model to match those factors with medical histories of heart disease.
They found that men who described themselves as "househusbands" had a 10-year death rate 82 percent higher than men who worked outside the home. They also found that men with prestigious jobs -- doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers -- had a significantly lower risk of heart disease and death. And those who made more than $50,000 had half the risk of death from heart disease than men who made less than $10,000.
Meanwhile, women in jobs characterized by "high decision authority and high job demands" -- for example, high-ranking corporate executives -- were at almost three times the risk of heart disease as women with "low authority and high demands."
"It seems to show that perhaps people in positions that are contrary to social expectations may experience health consequences," Eaker says.
But, she adds, the results may not apply to the America of today.
"These data are from the early 1980s, when being a househusband was not an easy thing to do," she says. "And women in high authority then really struggled to get to those positions. So we're in a little bit of a quandary. We need to do current research and substantiate the findings in other populations."
Eaker herself is something of an example of the changing societal standards. Armed with her Harvard doctorate, she left the academic world three years ago to start her own business, Eaker Epidemiological Enterprises. Her current study was done with a grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
"I'm independent, and I'm able to do what I love doing," she says.
What she'd also love to do is find an answer to the question of how quickly society responds to changes in conventional roles.
"Hopefully, as more and more people move into these positions, the stress will be mitigated. But we don't know that," she says.
Dr. Peter L. Schnall is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, Irvine, and director of the school's Center for Social Epidemiology. He says one possible explanation for Eaker's findings is that women in executive positions may be under more strain than men.
This could be due to the fact that more women are continuing to ascend to positions of leadership that weren't open to them in the past, he says.
"The way to talk about job strain is in terms of demand and control," Schnall adds.
Another explanation for the stress differences between the genders is the age-old fact that women are physically and psychologically different from men, he says.
"We have been puzzled by the fact that when you look at blood pressure, men have a very clear relationship between the job and blood pressure," he says. "The results for women are much more ambiguous. Women seem to respond to psychosocial stress differently than men."
And the story is still unfolding, Schnall adds. He has heard preliminary reports of European studies that found the same relationship between job stress and heart disease for men and women.
What to Do: Need some advice on handling stress at work? Try the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, or the American Heart Association.
