[Repeat sick leave procedures and diagnosis]

To find out the recurrence of absence due to sick leave from the perspective of diagnosing the disease-causing absenteeism.

Case-control study.

workers who only had only been on sick leave once.

workers with repeated sick leave. CASES with 2, 3, 4 or more absences due to sick leave were analysed separately.

Guipuzcoa, from 2001 to 2005.

There were 7,313 sick leave procedures collected from a Mutual Company with the medical reason, age and gender were duly registered and coded. Of the 6,030 workers who took some time off work, 5,016 had a single sick leave procedure, and were considered as controls and there were 1,014 cases that had two or more sick leave procedures.

We calculated the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals, adjusting for age and stratified by gender, using a logistic regression model. The slope of sick leave repeats was evaluated.

An increase in the risk of recurrent sick leave was observed for both genders over the age of 45, with a significant slope. There was an increase in the risk of recurrent sick leave in the most common diseases, musculoskeletal, external causes, mental and gastrointestinal in males, and pregnancy, musculoskeletal, mental and external causes in females.

An alternative method for verifying the correct prescribing of sick leave would be to just study diseases that occur most often. This would focus on those workers who had recurrent absences due to sick leave.