New York, May 18 (Reuters): The notion that being stressed out on the job causes high blood pressure doesn’t hold up, according to a new analysis of studies involving more than 100,000 people.

“There’s no doubt that in the moment stress raises blood pressure,” the study’s author, Dr Samuel J. Mann of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, said. But there’s virtually no evidence, he said, that such stress leads to chronic high blood pressure, or hypertension. “They’ve been trying to prove that for 40 years.”

While job stress can certainly affect health in some ways, he added, blood pressure isn’t one of them. “There’s a robust relationship between job stress and things like tension headaches, anxiety, depression,” Mann said. “If somebody is having all that and having headaches every day, can’t sleep and is anxious, then that’s a person who should change his job.”

Mann conducted his review after the 2003 publication of a study by French researchers that found no link between job stress and hypertension.

In the current analysis, he looked at 48 studies claiming to support such an association. Many, Mann found, had serious flaws ? for example, only basing the findings on diastolic pressure (the lower number in a blood pressure reading) rather than systolic pressure.

Others only found a stress-hypertension association in a small subgroup of individuals studied, and such subgroups varied from study to study. Still others looked at several variables measuring stress and found only one of them was linked, weakly, with hypertension, and played up this finding rather than the negative ones.

“After decades of research,” Mann concludes, “the evidence for a relationship between job stress and blood pressure is weak.”