Going postal – workplace deaths

Don’t get on with the people you’re working with? You’re more likely to die.

This study began in 1988, with baseline medical assessments performed on 820 healthy employees. Over the next 20 years there were 53 deaths amongst the group, and after controlling for variables and running regressions one main relationship was found:

…risk of mortality was significantly lower for those reporting high levels of peer social support. People with little or no “peer social support” in the workplace were 2.4 times more likely to die during the study.

Stressed by being told what to do all the time? You’re more likely to die.

A longitudinal study, conducted on 18,000 British civil servants – the so called Whitehall Study – found that

…even after accounting for genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, civil servants at the bottom of the pecking order still had nearly double the mortality rate.

Sitting down all day? You’re more likely to die.

Electrical activity in the muscles drop, and calorie consumption rate drops to about a third of what it would be if standing up, and there is a growing body of research that shows that exercising several times a week does not counteract this, such as from this research Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, which tracked 123,000 Americans over 14 years

…who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less