A Study of Occupational Characteristics and their Association with Cardiovascular Disease among Industrial Workers in...

Background An understanding of occupational characteristics of a worker is essential to establish policies, legislation in order to protect the health of the worker. The concept of Occupational Safety and Health is in initial stage in our country. Work-related cardiovascular disease (CVD) is caused by occupational factors that increase the oxygen requirements of the heart or decrease the capacity of the heart to use oxygen. It can be very difficult to link a specific work-related exposure to the development of cardiovascular disease in an individual person. This is because of issues of latency, multiple possible risk factors, lack of specific work-related features and various factors that influence diagnosis. Objective To study occupational characteristics and their association with cardiovascular disease among relatively young male industrial workers between 20-59 years of age in Sunsari-Morang industrial corridor of Eastern Nepal. Method A cross sectional study was conducted among men between 20 -59 years of age in two randomly selected industries in the Sunsari-Morang corridor of Eastern Nepal from July 2012 to July 2013. The data was collected using a pre-tested semi-structured questionnaire. Systematic random sampling was done to select the required number of samples. Chi-square and Fisher Exact tests were used. Crude and adjusted analyses were done. Result Majority (85%) were day shift workers. About 40% of the workers worked for 70-80 hrs/week. Most of them have stress sometimes at work. Noise was experienced by 40.9% of the workers. Earplug was used by only 5% of the workers. Hypertriglyceridaemia was seen in 49.3% of the workers. Long working hours, not using earplug and financial stress were seen to be associated with cardiovascular disease on bi-variate analysis. However, only earplug was significant in multivariate analysis. Conclusion Risk of cardiovascular disease was seen more among those who worked for more hours; those who did not use earplug and those who had financial stress. The results need further exploration to establish a causal association between occupational characteristics of the workers and cardiovascular disease in industrial set-up of eastern Nepal.