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Different working and living conditions and their associations with persistent neck/shoulder and/or low back
Ola Leijon1, Per Lindberg, Malin Josephson
1Division of Occupational Medicine, Department of Public Health Sciences, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. ola.leijon@sll.se
Objectives:
To investigate whether different combinations of working and living conditions are associated with the risk for persistent neck/shoulder and/or low back disorders. The underlying purpose of this contextual approach was to identify target groups for primary/secondary prevention.
Methods:
In a baseline study, 11 groups with different working and living conditions were identified by cluster analysis. In this study, these 11 groups were followed up by a postal questionnaire 5 years after baseline (response rate 82%, n = 1095).
Results:
Five of the groups--the onerous human services job, the free agent, the family burden, the mentally stretched and the physically strained groups--had an increased risk for persistent disorders (OR 2.38-2.70). Four of these groups had rather sex-specific working and living conditions.
Conclusions:
The results support the hypothesis that different combinations of working and living conditions may increase the risk for persistent neck/shoulder and/or low back disorders to different degrees. Sex-specific working and living conditions increased the risk for women as well as for men, irrespective of whether the conditions were specific to women or men.
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