Chronic noncommunicable diseases and absenteeism from work: National Survey of Health, 2019

To evaluate the association between burden of disease and multimorbidity and absenteeism in Brazil.

This is a cross-sectional study using data from the National Survey of Health 2019. The assessed outcome was absenteeism from work. The burden of disease was assessed by simply counting a list of 14 morbidities and multimorbidity was defined as: ≥two chronic diseases. Poisson regression models stratified by sex were used to estimate crude and adjusted prevalence ratios and their respective 95% confidence intervals.

Of the 96,131,029 employed individuals, 38.5% reported absenteeism (95%CI 32.9-44.3). The most prevalent morbidities among women who reported absenteeism were back problems (50.8%), depression (42.9%), and hypertension (41.6%); and among men, hypertension (39.7%), chronic back pain (34.1%), and dyslipidemia (19.9%), among those who reported absenteeism. Having multimorbidity increased the report of absenteeism among women by 73% (95%CI 1.01-2.96); among men, there was no association after progressive adjustment for sociodemographic and health factors [PR 1.27 (95%CI 0.96-1.71)].

The burden of disease and multimorbidity are highly prevalent among employed individuals and are strongly related to absenteeism from work, especially among women. In this sense, workers must be the target of interventions to reduce the impact of chronic noncommunicable diseases.