Impact of a four-year wellness programme on coronary artery disease risk in male employees

Abstract

During the last few decades employers have realised that the health of an employee can have a positive influence on productivity.Thus, some corporate employers started implementing wellness programmes as part of their employee assistance programmes. In order to evaluate the impact of such programmes, the present study used a sample of 91 male employees. Baseline medical screening was performed after which a wellness programme was introduced. Employees were monitored every year for progress and the post-test was performed at the end of the four-year period. Employees were monitored for changes in total cholesterol (TC), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL), low- density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL), triglycerides (TG), TC/HDL ratio, LDL/HDL ratio, fasting blood glucose (BG), systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), body mass index (BMI) and total coronary artery disease (CAD) risk.The Repeated Measures General Linear Model Test was used to determine significant changes (p≤0.05) from pre-test to post-test. The results indicated that the wellness programme significantly decreased CAD risk by 25.6%. The TC, LDL-C, LDL/HDL-C ratio, TC/HDL-C ratio, BG, resting SBP and resting DBP also improved significantly, while TG showed a non-significant improvement. Two CAD risk factors however, deteriorated significantly namely,HDL and BMI.The major finding of this investigation suggests that a corporate wellness programme has long-term beneficial effects on CAD risk in men and that the reduction in CAD risk is mainly attributed to the beneficial effects of regular exercise and lifestyle modifications.Key words: Coronary artery disease, wellness, exercise, employee.