While we found evidence for an incremental effect of different psychosocial work factors (in addition to the effect of physical job factors), these results have to be interpreted carefully in order to support the notion that psychological factors can have an independent causal influence on the development of musculoskeletal disorders. Nevertheless, our findings are important for the development of preventive strategies, as they stress the need for preventive approaches that tackle both physical and psychosocial factors. Future research is warranted to consolidate and strengthen the results of this review.

The aim of the present analysis was to examine the association of a medical history of asthma, hay fever, eczema, or epilepsy with the risk of glioma and meningioma. Data of a German population-based case-control study included 381 meningioma cases, 366 glioma cases, and 1,494 controls. Participants' histories of asthma, hay fever, eczema, and epilepsy and the respective ages at onset were asked during a personal interview. A small inverse association between allergic condition and both glioma (odds ratio: 0.92; 95% CI: 0.70-1.22) and meningioma (odd ratio: 0.87; 95% CI: 0.66-1.14) was found. For glioma, this inverse association was more pronounced in persons reporting to have asthma compared to other allergic conditions. The positive association between epilepsy and particularly glioma suggests that epilepsy is an early symptom of the disease. As the association was seen also for epilepsies occurring more than a decade before the diagnosis of glioma, this might indicate either an aetiological role of epilepsy, or a relatively long preclinical phase. In conclusion our study confirms previous findings of case control studies but not those from cohort studies. However, possible selection bias in case control studies might not explain the different results in its entirety.

BackgroundMultimorbidity is one of the most important and challenging aspects in public health. Multimorbid people are associated with more hospital admissions, a large number of drug prescriptions and higher risks of mortality. As there is evidence that multimorbidity varies with age and socioeconomic disparity, the main objective aimed at determining age-specific prevalence rates as well as exploring educational differences relating to multimorbidity in Germany.MethodsThis cross-sectional analysis is based on the national telephone health interview survey “German Health Update” (GEDA2012) conducted between March 2012 and March 2013 with nearly 20,000 adults. GEDA2012 provides information on 17 self-reported health conditions along with sociodemographic characteristics. Multimorbidity was defined as the occurrence of two or more chronic conditions in one individual at the same time. Descriptive statistical analysis was used to examine multimorbidity according to age and education, which was defined by the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED 1997).ResultsOverall, 39.6% (95% confidence interval (CI) 38.7%–40.6%) of the 19,294 participants were multimorbid and the proportion of adults with multimorbidity increased substantially with age: nearly half (49.2%, 95% CI 46.9%–51.5%) of the adults aged 50–59 years had already two or more chronic health conditions. Prevalence rates of multimorbidity differed considerably between the levels of education. Low-level educated adults aged 40–49 years were more likely to be multimorbid with a prevalence rate of 47.4% (95% CI 44.2%–50.5%) matching those of highly educated men and women aged about ten years older.ConclusionsOur findings demonstrate that both, age and education are associated with a higher risk of being multimorbid in Germany. Hence, special emphasis in the development of new approaches in national public health and prevention programs on multimorbidity should be given to low-level educated people aged <65 years.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-017-4833-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Compared with other European countries, home death is still a frequent event in the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Regional health policy should consider the actual distribution of place of death and corresponding predicting factors when establishing specialized palliative care home services as designed by recent German health legislation.