Health problems and stress in Information Technology

CeeCee Conrad
Created Feb 15 2018
Interests: Endocrinology, Internal Medicine, Diabetes Mellitus
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Tags: Internal Medicine, Public Health, Family Medicine, Epidemiology, Technology

Stress is high in software profession because of their nature of work, target, achievements, night shift, over work load.

Objectives

To study the demographic profile of the employees.
To access the level of job stress and quality of life of the respondents.
To study in detail the health problems of the employees.

All employees working in IT and BPO industry for more than two years were included into the study. A detailed questionnaire of around 1000 IT and BPO employees including their personal details, stress score by Holmes and Rahe to assess the level of stress and master health checkup profile were taken and the results were analysed. Around 56% had musculoskeletal symptoms. 22% had newly diagnosed hypertension,10% had diabetes, 36% had dyslipidemia, 54% had depression, anxiety and insomnia, 40% had obesity. The stress score was higher in employees who developed diabetes, hypertension and depression. Early diagnosis of stress induced health problems can be made out by stress scores, intense lifestyle modification, diet advice along with psychological counselling would reduce the incidence of health problems in IT sector and improve the quality of work force.

Figure 1. Percentage of health problems in information technology employees.

The daily impact of IT on our lives continues unabated. As innovations and computer capacities increase this influence will continue to grow in the coming years at an increasing rate. As technology advances, there is also increased stress that is associated with it called as “technology stress.” IT is here to stay. This brings extra pressure on people to adapt to new advancements and update their knowledge in their field.

Annual stress scoring has to be done and a score above 300 needs stress management program like yoga, meditation and other destressing activities like aerobics, dance etc., would prevent or reduce risk of disease due to stress in IT people which in turn will produce a healthy community.

Conclusion

To manage stress these people need to play sport, have a hobby or just have a good holiday. Stress score helps us to screen who would be prone to stress related physical illness and people with a score more than 300 are at risk of illness and care should be taken at the earliest to relive their stress. Healthy employees mean better performance by employee that in turn produce a healthy community. Annual stress scoring has to be done, and employees are having a score more than 300 should be involved in active antistress

References

Padma, V., Anand, N., Gurukul, S. M. G. S., Javid, S. M. A. S. M., Prasad, A., & Arun, S. (2015). Health problems and stress in Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing employees. Journal of Pharmacy and Bioallied Sciences, 7(5), 9. doi:10.4103/0975-7406.155764

Rosengren, A., Hawken, S., Ôunpuu, S., Sliwa, K., Zubaid, M., Almahmeed, W. A., … Yusuf, S. (2004). Association of psychosocial risk factors with risk of acute myocardial infarction in 11 119 cases and 13 648 controls from 52 countries (the INTERHEART study): case-control study. The Lancet, 364(9438), 953–962. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(04)17019-0

Marmot, M., Bosma, H., Hemingway, H., Brunner, E., & Stansfeld, S. (1997). Contribution of job control and other risk factors to social variations in coronary heart disease incidence. The Lancet, 350(9073), 235–239. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(97)04244-x

Comments

Elvis Sauer almost 7 years ago

Thank you for this thoughtful post. As a software engineer with longstanding chronic neck pain, I have only recently started to understand my own disease. This is an issue that I feel many of my colleagues are not comfortable with openly talking about. I think it's about time that we remove the stigma with talking about mental wellness in this industry.

Jovan Connelly almost 7 years ago

Great post, CeeCee. I recently posted about health issues among registered nurses and noticed there are some similar trends in our findings. I would love to get in touch to discuss our data.

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