A lot’s been written about this piece at the New York Times seemingly linking prolific blogging habits to — well, an early demise.  Without rehashing too much of what other bloggers have said, its a bit of an idiotic piece for two reasons:

i) There are many successful bloggers who do *NOT* work on that kind of schedule

ii) Blogging on a tight schedule doesn’t necessarily lead to sudden cardiac death

While balance and judgement are things I usually associate with the Times, this piece had a surprising dearth of both of those things in this respect.

Irrespective of how blogging might not equal “stress”, or that bloggers don’t have the monopoly on stress in their workplace lives, what would have been nice is if the author had dug up some real medical evidence to back up his implicit claim that “stress is bad”, rather than lead off with the deaths of some bloggers and quotes by Mike Arrington claiming his ill health is due to the stress of blogging — all of which sounds slightly sensational.

Matt Richtel, in fact, could have quoted some interesting studies (which I will be happy to do, as I am a giant procrastinator) which have shown some interesting links between chronic *and* acute stress in increasing your risk for heart attack and stroke.

Chronic Stress At Work May Increase Your Risk Of The Metabolic Syndrome: Metabolic syndrome, or “Syndrome X”, is a constellation of risks that constitute an elevated risk for cardiac disease.  These are obesity, insulin resistance (such as diabetes), high blood pressure, and elevated cholesterol.  In one study published in 2006, they looked at over 10 000 people over 14 years, all of whom worked in the British civil service.  What they found was that there seemed to be a link between chronic stress (measured by questionnaire) at work and the development of metabolic syndrome independent of any other risk factors.  In fact, they were *twice* as likely to develop metabolic syndrome than those not having chronic stress.  This article has been thought to show biological plausibility between the link of chronic neurohumoral stress and cardiac risk.

Bottom Line: the quality of the study wasn’t such that it could demonstrate causality, but what it did show on a fairly large scale was that there is a possible link for something that most people intuitively believe: stress == increased risk for heart attacks and strokes (through a surrogate risk, in turn).

Psychological Stress, Not Depression, An Independent Risk For Stroke: Its been known for quite a while that major depressive episodes are an independent risk factor for heart disease (and will probably increase your risk of having *another* heart attack after having the first), but in 2008 a study looked at whether or not depression *or* psychological stress was a risk for stroke.  Again in the UK, over 20 000 individuals were followed for almost 9 years, and what they found was that *both* were associated with current cigarette smoking, obesity, prior MI, lower social class, and treatment for hypertension.  However, only greater psychological stress was associated diabetes, higher blood cholesterol, and less education.  Even *after* these were corrected for, an increased risk of stroke was not linked to a lifetime or prior year depression — but psychological stress was.  In fact, they measured with a particular scale / questionnaire, and each standard deviation higher on the stress scale was associated with an 11% relative increase in your risk for stroke.

Bottom line: While separating clinical depression and ‘mere’ psychological stress isn’t always an easy thing, this is another piece of evidence that suggests that even if you’re not seeing a psychiatrist (or need to take medication), you may be at risk for brain attacks — I mean, stroke.

Cardiovascular Events Go Up During Acute Periods Of Stress:  You may have heard of this one, as the timing of the publication coincided with the Superbowl this year.  At any rate if you hadn’t heard about it, here it is: researchers looked at the incidence of cardiovascular events presenting to emergency physicians in Germany during the World Cup in 2006. They discovered that the incidence of cardiac emergencies was 2.6 times higher than during control periods (presumably non-World Cup times), with the highest incident rate being within 2 hours of the match starting; those cardiac emergencies were (for those interested in such things), dangerous arrhythmias, as well as severe ‘infarcting-through-the-wall-of-the-heart’ heart attacks (i.e. ST elevation MI’s).  These risks were elevated if you were a man or a woman, and irrespective of a history of cardiac disease.

Bottom line: Although they couldn’t account for a ton of other confounding risks (obesity, not taking your medication, over eating at so on), some entertaining (if lower quality) evidence that short bursts of intense stress might elevate your risk of a cardiac event by two times (or, if you wanted to be sensational, 100%!)

At the end of the day, I think the above points to a lot of circumstantial evidence that perhaps stress should be looked at a little more seriously; while stress might lead to the development of other direct risks which might impinge heart health, I think we all — irrespective of whatever we do, blogging or otherwise — need to find a work-life balance, if not for our overall happiness (and prevention of burnout), but also for the sakes of our own personal health.

Heck — just ask Om Malik.