PS 15-04 Perceived Job stress and presence of hypertension among administrative officers in Sri Lanka

Objective: The effect of job-stress on productivity and health outcomes have received increasing attention during the past few decades. A preponderance of studies has been conducted in developed countries where conditions may be dissimilar to those developing countries. Hence the objective was to determine prevalence of job-stress and explore the relationship between perceived job-stress and presence of hypertension among administrators in a District of Sri Lanka. Design and Method: A cross-sectional survey was carried out among 275 and 760 randomly selected senior-officers (SOs) and managerial-assistants (MAs) aged 30–60 years attached to Public Administration offices in a district in Sri Lanka. A self-administered questionnaire gathered information on socio-demographic and work-related data, lifestyle-practices, and medical history. The Effort-Reward-Imbalance questionnaire validated to the Sri Lankan context among a similar population measured job-stress. Blood pressure (measured and classified using JNC-7 guidelines) anthropometric indices, biochemical parameters were recorded. Sum of scores of efforts, rewards, and over-commitment (scores in the upper tertile are considered to have an excessive asymmetry) and effort–reward ratio (>1 indicate an unfavorable ratio) assessed job-stress. Results: The response rates of SOs and MAs were 98.9% and 97.2%, respectively. The prevalence of job stress based on high effort–rewards imbalance among SOs and MAs was 74.6% and 80.5%, respectively. Prevalence of over-commitment among SOs and MAs was 35.3% and 29%, respectively. After adjustment for a range of potentially confounding factors, effort–reward imbalance (odds-ratio [OR] = 2.8; 95% confidence-interval [CI] = 1.1–7.4), high efforts (OR = 2.5; 95% CI = 1.2–5.3), and over-commitment (OR = 2.5; 95% CI = 1.1–5.6) were significantly associated with hypertension among SOs. Similarly, effort–reward imbalance and high efforts increased the risk of hypertension by 2-fold (OR = 2.2; 95% CI = 1.1–4.2) and 3-fold (OR = 3.02; 95% CI = 1.9–4.8), respectively, among the MAs. Conclusions: Evidences suggest that a substantially higher number of administrators are afflicted by job stress, and job stress was associated with hypertension.