“A man’s employment status was a stronger predictor of his risk of dying from coronary heart disease than any of the more familiar risk factors.”
This was the authors’ poignant conclusion of the landmark Whitehall epidemiological study.1 British civil servants with the lowest-grade occupation, compared with those in the highest grade, had 3 times the risk of cardiovascular death. Similar findings across diverse settings have linked occupation-based physical inactivity to a higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors and poor outcomes.2,3