Musculoskeletal complaints in the Netherlands in relation to age, gender and physically demanding work

Abstract

Objectives: This cross-sectional study was performed in order to elucidate the relationship of musculoskeletal complaints with age, gender and physically demanding work in the Netherlands. Methods: Questionnaire data of male (n 36 756) and female (n 7730) employees, gathered as part of periodical occupational health surveys among active workers in the Netherlands, were strati®ed for age, gender, and type of work demands. For each strati®ed group prevalence rates (PR) were calculated for complaints of the back, neck, upper and lower extremities. Moreover, prevalence rate dierences (PRD) were estimated as an absolute eect measure of exposure to various types of physical work demands, with active employees in mentally demanding work acting as a reference population. Results: Musculoskeletal complaints among workers in physically demanding occupations were found to increase with age for both sexes. For several complaints, substantially higher rates were reported for women than for men, with a relatively high number of complaints observed among the older female workers (around 40% for complaints of back, upper and lower extremities). Signi®cant PRDs were present in particular for employees in heavy physically demanding occupations and in jobs with mixed mental and physical work demands. Conclusions: With the ageing of the workforce in mind, these ®ndings stress the need for implementation of preventive measures. Special attention towards the susceptible group of female employees, the elderly age groups in particular, seems justi®ed. In order to clarify the combined eects of age and physical work demands on musculoskeletal complaints, additional studies are required.

Gender differences in upper extremity musculoskeletal complaints in the working population

“…These factors may have biased some of the work-relatedness of the reported gender dierences in complaints. However, despite these limitations, the use of these exposure measures have been proven to generate valuable information on associations between work and individual characteristics and upper extremity symptoms, in particular when data is analysed at group level from large and heterogeneous occupational populations (De Zwart et al 1997a, Franklin et al 1991, Hagberg and Wegman 1987, Tanaka et al 1995.…”

“…among car assembly workers (Zetterberg and O È fverholm 1999), newspaper employees , salespeople (Skov et al 1996), ®sh industry workers (Chiang et al 1993;Nordander et al 1999), and oce workers (Bergqvist et al 1995). In large-scale studies of the general working population in dierent countries, the higher risk for women of the onset of these types of complaint have also been consistently observed (De Zwart et al 1997a;Ekberg et al 1995;Feuerstein et al 1998;Franklin et al 1991;Linton 1990;Tanaka et al 1995). The explanations for these gender dierences, however, are still poorly understood.…”

The demographic and contextual correlates of work‐related repetitive strain injuries among canadian men and women

“…Also lower extremity MSK complaints are higher among women as well [Messing et al, 2008;Messing et al, 2009]. However, less consistent is research examining back complaints, where some studies indicate increased prevalence for women [Krause et al, 1997;de Zwart et al, 1997], while others report increased prevalence for men [Leino-Arjas, 1998;Hooftman et al, 2009].…”

“…Also lower extremity MSK complaints are higher among women as well [Messing et al, 2008;Messing et al, 2009]. However, less consistent is research examining back complaints, where some studies indicate increased prevalence for women [Krause et al, 1997;de Zwart et al, 1997], while others report increased prevalence for men [Leino-Arjas, 1998;Hooftman et al, 2009].Supporting the notion that work exposures are a major contributing factor for gender differences, some studies examining exposure differences tend to find that MSK complaints are not significantly different when comparing men and women in the same occupational categories or performing the same tasks [Silverstein et al, 1987;Coury et al, 2002; European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, 2003]. However, a review of specific exposures and MSK complaints suggests certain vulnerabilities for both men and women [Hooftman et al, 2004].…”

The effects of prior combat experience on the expression of somatic and affective symptoms in deploying soldiers

“…Overall, 67.1% of VETs were between the ages of 30 and 39 years, whereas the largest percentage (41.6%) of NO-COM soldiers was between the ages of 20 and 24 years. Given that somatic complaints may increase [23,24] and affective symptoms decline as individuals grow older [25], age was included as a covariate in a repeated-measures ANCOVA with the same variables. In addition, because scores on the PTSD scale were correlated with the Affective scale (r=.67, Pb.001) and Somatic scale (r=.47, Pb.001) z scores, total PTSD score was also included as a second covariate.…”