‘Injustice’ boosts heart attack likelihood

People who feel they are being treated unfairly in life are at a significantly higher likelihood of suffering from heart attacks.

A study of 8,000 senior civil servants at Whitehall over the last 11 years found that individuals with a high sense of injustice were twice as to have serious heart disease.

Participants in the University College London (UCL) survey were asked to score their response to the statement “I often have the feeling that I am being treated unfairly” on a scale of one to six, with answers of one or two classed as low, three or four moderate and five or six high.

Over the 11-year period, 528 fatal and non-fatal and angina cases in people who had no previous signs of heart disease were recorded.

Researchers found that respondents in the high group were 55 per cent more likely to suffer heart disease than those in the moderate group and twice as likely compared to individuals in the low category.

“Unfairness is an independent predictor of increased coronary events and impaired health functioning,” the authors write in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, a daughter publication of the British Medical Journal.

“Further research is needed to disentangle the effects of unfairness from other psychosocial constructs and to investigate the societal, relational and biological mechanisms that may underlie its associations with health and heart disease.”

In addition, today’s survey showed that women and those of a low economic and social status were “significantly” more likely to feel they were being treated unfairly.

The UCL study was adjusted to take account of traditional risk factors including socioeconomic status, gender, age, chronic job stress and personality traits.