Overloading yourself with work, spending longer than usual time at workplace, make people susceptible to hypertension and high blood pressure, reveals a study conducted by a Canadian research team.

Many of these may even be suffering from a hidden form of hypertension called masked hypertension, which is very difficult to diagnose and therefore goes unnoticed by the doctors. An experiment conducted on 3,500 white-collar employees at three public institutions, revealed that compared to colleagues who worked fewer than 35 hours a week, working 49 or more hours each week was linked to a 70% greater likelihood of having masked hypertension and elevated blood pressure.

People working between 41 and 48 hours each week were linked to a 54% greater likelihood of having masked hypertension and a 42% greater likelihood of having sustained hypertension. The findings accounted for variables such as job strain, age, sex, education level, occupation, smoking status, body mass index, and other factors.