Development of a quantitative job exposure matrix for standing, walking, and forward bending among pregnant workers -...

Occupational physical activity (OPA) during pregnancy has been linked to adverse pregnancy outcomes, but crude exposure assessment remains an issue in causal inference. We aimed to develop a quantitative trimester-specific job exposure matrix (JEM) for standing, walking, and forward bending among pregnant workers.

Accelerometer measurements from 403 female workers across 109 DISCO-08 job codes were obtained in Denmark between January 2023 and June 2024. Full workdays were measured during two weeks among pregnant workers and one week among non-pregnant workers. We used linear mixed-effects models to estimate exposure levels of occupational standing, walking, and forward bending for all 1171 DISCO-08 codes, including age, trimester, and expert ratings as fixed effects, and job codes and workers as random effects.

The between-job variances relative to total variances were 56% for standing, 51% for walking, and 45% for forward bending. The fixed effect trimester reduced standing time by 0.38 hours during the 3rd trimester compared to non-pregnant participants, whereas no differences were observed for walking or forward bending. Based on the trimester-specific JEM for occupational standing time, bakers had the highest exposure (range from non-pregnant to 3rd trimester, 5.41-5.03 hours/workday). For walking and forward bending, the highest exposed jobs from the pregnancy-specific JEM were waiters (1.76 hours/workday) and livestock/dairy producers (1.24 hours/workday), respectively.

The JEM enhances independent objective exposure assessment in epidemiological studies of OPA and pregnancy outcomes and may advance guidelines and potentially prevent adverse pregnancy outcomes.