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Job strain and blood pressure in African Americans: the Pitt County Study
A B Curtis1, S A James, T E Raghunathan
1Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 48109, USA.
Objectives:
This report examined whether job strain (or its components, decision latitude and job demands) was associated with elevated blood pressure levels in a community-based sample of 726 African-American adults.
Methods:
Blood-pressure, anthropometric, behavioral, demographic, and psychosocial data were collected for the current cross-sectional analyses during home interviews conducted for the second wave (1993) of the Pitt County Study (North Carolina), a prospective cohort study of hypertension among African Americans.
Results:
Job strain was not associated with blood pressure among men or women in this study. However, men in the 80th percentile of decision latitude had more than a 50% decrease in the prevalence of hypertension compared with men in the 20th percentile (odds ratio = .46, 95% confidence interval = .22, .96).
Conclusions:
These results indicate that decision latitude may be important for hypertension risk among African-American men. More research is needed on African Americans to determine why job strain and its two component variables differ in their associations with blood pressure for men and women.