Blood pressure lower for working women.

When women began to make inroads into the managerial and professional ranks in the mid-1960s, conventional wisdom held that career success would bring with it a host of work-related health problems. Job stress, it maintained, would leave women as ravaged by high blood pressure and heart attacks as men.

A new finding appears to put such concerns to rest. North Carolina researchers have found no overall increase in women's blood pressure to go along with their increased presence in the workplace. In fact, professional women enjoy lower blood pressure than women who stay at home.

"Basically, the theory that job stress will make women as susceptible to cardiovascular disease as men doesn't bear out," says study author Kathryn Rose of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health.

Rose and her colleagues used data from the National Health Examination Survey of 1960 and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of 1976 to 1980. In the 1960 study, 64 percent of the 2,500 women surveyed listed their occupation as homemaker. Working white women filled predominantly sales and clerical positions. Black women, who reported higher employment rates, had largely domestic jobs.

Sixteen years later, 54 percent of the 3,800 women surveyed worked, about one-quarter of them as managers and professionals. This dramatic difference in employment patterns led Rose's team to compare blood pressure readings for the two sets of women.

In the 1960 survey, the researchers saw only a very small trend toward higher blood pressure in working women. In comparison, women in the later survey had lower overall blood pressure, regardless of employment status. However, as Rose reported at the annual meeting of the Society for Epidemiologic Research in Snowbird, Utah, last week, the decrease was more pronounced, at 23 percent, among working women than nonworking women, who experienced a 4 percent decrease.

"Overall, the working women had lower blood pressures than those who were not employed," says Rose. Seventeen percent fewer working women suffered high blood pressure than women who stayed at home.

Rose separated the women into two age groups, 25 to 44 and 45 to 64. Among the older group, working and nonworking women in the later survey registered lower blood pressure than women in the earlier one. Looking at the younger groups, the prevalence of hypertension had increased for stay-at-home women in the second survey, she found: High blood pressure increased by 15.3 percent among young, nonworking black women and by 1.7 percent among young, nonworking white women.

However, Stephen Havas of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore questions any link between hypertension and employment. He says the condition is far more closely related to weight, high-sodium diets, and alcohol. Other studies show that workers are healthier than nonworkers.

Rose agrees that higher blood pressure among the stay-at-home women may result in part from the healthy worker effect--that is, health problems may keep these women out of the workplace.