Working single mothers may have a higher risk of heart disease and stroke than married women.

A new study suggests that single women with children and jobs were 40 per cent more likely to have heart disease and more than 70 per cent more likely to have a stroke than their married counterparts.

"Losing support from a partner, or the security of a job, may cause stress and result in unhealthy behaviors," said senior study author Frank van Lenthe of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

According to the study, single mothers were more likely to smoke. It is also possible that financial factors influence the odds of a cardiovascular disease, said Margot Witvliet, a researcher at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim who wasn't involved in the study.

The study examined data on health, work and marital status for almost 17 000 women in U.S and Europe. The odds of being a single working mother were twice as high in the U.S. as in Europe, with 11 per cent of U.S. women in the study and 5 per cent of the women in Europe.