A new study from Finland found that the more a person is strained at work, the more that person becomes prone to illness in old age, according MSN News.

People involved in mentally and physically straining work, the study found, were tied to more hospital stays later in life. The strain can either be mental - meeting deadlines, high work demands, little control over one's work - or physical - muscle strain, sweating, breathlessness, the report said.

"Job strain is something that is individually perceived, so persons working in similar jobs can report different amounts of job strain," Mikaela von Bonsdorff, study lead and gerontology researcher at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, told MSN News. "When talking about job strain it is important to remember that occasional feelings of job strain are not necessarily a bad thing, but persistent high job strain has been identified as a health hazard."

von Bonsdorff added that in recent studies, they found that long-term job strain is linked to lower physical and mental function when a person becomes older.

von Bonsdorff and her team looked at more than 5,000 middle-aged employees in Finland's public sector who were surveyed about work stress in 1981. They then combined these data with national hospital records that span the next 28 years.

Her team found that the higher the strain a person experienced in his mid-working life, especially those whose work involved physically strenuous tasks, the more this person end up longer or more frequently in the hospital.

"What was interesting was that these associations were clear also when we looked at hospital care that took place after the individuals had turned 65, indicating that these associations were also robust in older age and not that the association was due to hospital care that took place immediately after the baseline assessment of job strain," von Bonsdorff said.