'Covert' coping with job conflict ups heart risk

Walking away or letting things pass may be an unhealthy way to deal with unfair treatment on the job, research from Sweden shows.

Men who reported using such "covert" coping strategies were more than twice as likely to have a heart attack or die from heart disease over the next 10 years, Dr Constanze Leineweber of the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University, and her colleagues, found.

Previous investigations have linked covert coping with job conflict to heart disease risk factors, but not heart disease itself, Leineweber and her team note in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.