Smoking and physically demanding work linked to higher death risk
Death risk was 2.60 times as high among smokers with physically demanding jobs as among nonsmokers with low physical work demands.
Our read
Populations- Studied:
- Meta-analysis of 36,076 participants reporting physical work demands, average 25 years
- What changed:
- Death risk was 2.60-fold higher among smokers with physically demanding work than among nonsmokers with low physical work demands
- The catch:
- Diet quality was unmeasured and could confound the link with death
- In the record:
- One of 6 papers on physical work demands on record: 4 with results in people.
Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
Adults aged 36–62 from England, Finland, France and the US took part in a multicohort study combining four groups followed over time. The sample included 41,760 people, including 17,016 women. Participants reported work demands, smoking, drinking and leisure-time activity at enrollment. Researchers tracked deaths through linked records for an average of 25 years.
Smoking combined with high physical work demands was associated with higher death risk than low physical demands without smoking. The analysis accounted for age, sex, education and other measured factors. Smoking with low physical demands was also associated with higher death risk. Evidence that the combination added risk beyond the sum of the separate associations was uncertain. For demands involving mental strain or stress, unhealthy behaviors alone predicted death more strongly than their combination with high demands.
Why it matters
For efforts to extend longevity, the authors suggest that employees with physically demanding work and unhealthy behaviors are likely to benefit most from future preventive strategies.
Caveats
Work demands and habits were self-reported at enrollment, so later changes and other differences between workers could have influenced the links. Participants were 36–62 at enrollment; the results may not apply outside that age range.
From the paper
- Result
The risk was higher for active smoking in the absence of physical demands (pooled HR, pHR 2.38, 95% CI 1.93 to 2.93) and increased even further when both exposures were present (pHR 2.60, 95% CI 1.98 to 3.43).
Results, The combined effect of physical work demands and health behaviours on all-cause mortality
Quoted word for word from the full text on jech.bmj.com.
The paper
Tampere University
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Nov 10, 2026, Open access, CC BY
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