Respective Mediating Effects of Social Position and Work Environment on the Incidence of Common Cardiovascular Risk Factors.

Background Social position and work environment are highly interrelated and their respective contribution to cardiovascular risk is still debated. Methods and Results In a cohort of 20 625 French workers followed for 25 years, discrete-time survival analysis with reciprocal mediating effects, adjusted for sex, age, and parental history of early coronary heart disease, was performed using Bayesian structural equation modeling to simultaneously investigate the extent to which social position mediates the effect of work environment and, inversely, the extent to which work environment mediates the effect of social position on the incidence of common cardiovascular risk factors. Depending on the factor, social position mediates 2% to 53% of the effect of work environment and work environment mediates 9% to 87% of the effect of social position.