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The Epidemiology of Working Life: Reorganizing Occupational Health Science Around Work-Structured Exposure Systems.

Yorghos Apostolopoulos¹

¹Prolepsis: Partners in Prevention Inc., Orlando, Florida, USA.

American Journal of Industrial Medicine

|May 26, 2026

Summary

Occupational epidemiology needs a new framework, the Epidemiology of Working Life (EWL), to address cumulative workplace risks. EWL analyzes work-structured exposure systems for better health prevention across working lives.

Keywords:

epidemiology of working life exposomics exposure systems health equity lifecourse epidemiology occupational epidemiology systems epidemiology working‐life‐exposome

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Area of Science:

Occupational health science
Epidemiology

Background:

Traditional occupational epidemiology focuses on discrete hazards, which is insufficient for understanding contemporary work's health impacts.
Contemporary work risks often stem from cumulative, interacting exposures generated by work organization, extending beyond the workplace and accumulating over a working life.

Purpose of the Study:

To propose the Epidemiology of Working Life (EWL) as a novel framework for occupational health science.
To shift the focus from individual hazards to work-structured exposure systems and their role in generating risk across working life.

Main Methods:

The proposed EWL framework centers analysis on the working-life-exposome.
It examines work-structured exposure systems that generate recurring configurations of co-occurring exposures under specific employment conditions.
The approach shifts the unit of inference from individual hazards to recurring exposure configurations and the systems generating them.

Main Results:

EWL redefines exposure, risk analysis, and prevention points in occupational health.
It enables earlier detection of risks and identifies interventions that reduce multiple harms simultaneously.
The framework yields three key outputs: recurrent exposure configurations linked to risk, their upstream drivers, and early-warning indicators.

Conclusions:

EWL provides a more comprehensive approach to understanding how work shapes health by considering cumulative and interacting exposures.
This framework strengthens the alignment between epidemiological evidence and prevention strategies in complex work environments.
By centering on work-structured exposure systems, EWL offers improved opportunities for anticipatory intervention and risk reduction throughout working life.