By Science News Staff

Web edition: July 29, 2011
Print edition: August 13, 2011; Vol.180 #4 (p. 4)

“CLIMBERS” PRONE TO ILLNESS — “Nonhazardous” occupations can be dangerous for men who work their way up.  Eighty-four out of 139 young men between the ages of  22 and 32 who had attained managerial positions showed more illness than 55 co-workers who stepped into the same kind of job right out of college.... The men who had worked their way up displayed both acute and chronic symptoms, including signs indicating eventual high blood pressure and hardening of the arteries.... The men who were sick more often ... had grown up in modest to substandard neighborhoods in low-income families where the fathers generally had a grammar-school education or less. As a result their climb up the ladder of success was full of challenges, threats, demands and other factors of a domestic and financial nature ... unfamiliar to them.