If you suspect your stressful job is killing you, a new study says you may be right — especially if you’re a woman.

After analyzing data on nearly 140,000 workers from three continents, researchers found those with “high-strain” jobs were 22 percent more likely than their peers to suffer a stroke. The risk was particularly acute for women, who were 33 percent more likely to have a stroke if their jobs fell into this most stressful category.

The findings, published in the journal Neurology, combine results from six previous studies that examined the relationship between work stress and stroke risk. Each of the studies included a baseline assessment of people’s job strain, then tracked their health for 3.4 years to 16.7 years. The workers ranged in age from 18 to 75.

Many of the workers had demanding jobs, but not all were considered stressful. The researchers, from China, used a well-established method to categorize jobs into four categories.

To do this, they considered whether a job involved a high degree of “psychological job demand.” That’s a measure of the mental load required to carry out tasks, the amount of management and coordination required to finish those tasks and the time pressure imposed by deadlines, among other things. The researchers also considered how much latitude workers had in deciding how to carry out their assignments, a factor known as “job control.”

Dr. Jennifer Majersik, a stroke neurologist at the University of Utah, described the four categories in an editorial that accompanied the study. Jobs on the low end of the spectrum for both psychological demand and control are considered “passive,” such as manual labor gigs. These stand in contrast to “active” jobs that combine high psychological demand and high control such as doctors and engineers.

In between are “low-strain” professions that feature low psychological demand and high control, such as scientists and architects, Majersik wrote. Finally, there are “high-strain” jobs that pair high psychological demand with a lack of control; waitresses and nursing aides, she wrote.

The risk of stroke was lowest for people with low-strain jobs, the Chinese researchers found. They were followed by people with passive and active jobs, though the differences were so small that they could have been due to chance.

The only difference big enough to be considered statistically significant was for people with high-strain jobs; the stroke risk for these unlucky workers was 22 percent higher than for people in the low-strain category.