Abstract
Monitoring of indoor climate is an essential part of occupational health and safety. While questionnaires are commonly used for surveillance, not all workers may perceive an identical indoor climate similarly. The aim of this study was to evaluate perceived indoor climate among workers with chronic pain compared with pain-free colleagues and to determine the influence of central sensitization on this perception. Eighty-two male slaughterhouse workers, 49 with upper-limb chronic pain and 33 pain-free controls, replied to a questionnaire with 13 items of indoor climate complaints. Pressure pain threshold (PPT) was measured in muscles of the arm, shoulder, and lower leg. Cross-sectional associations were determined using general linear models controlled for age, smoking, and job position. The number of indoor climate complaints was twice as high among workers with chronic pain compared with pain-free controls (1.8 [95% CI: 1.3–2.3] versus 0.9 [0.4–1.5], resp.). PPT of the nonpainful leg muscle was negatively associated with the number of complaints. Workers with chronic pain reported more indoor climate complaints than pain-free controls despite similar actual indoor climate. Previous studies that did not account for musculoskeletal pain in questionnaire assessment of indoor climate may be biased. Central sensitization likely explains the present findings.
Highlights
Previous research has documented the importance of a good indoor climate for workers health and safety [1,2,3,4]
In model 3, we investigated the association between central sensitization and chronic pain by including Pressure pain threshold (PPT) of tibialis anterior as the dependent variable
Model 1 explained 9% of the variance observed for average indoor complaints and shows that slaughterhouse workers with chronic pain reported twice as many indoor climate complaints as pain-free controls corresponding to a between-group difference of 0.9 complaints
Summary
Previous research has documented the importance of a good indoor climate for workers health and safety [1,2,3,4]. Effective occupational health and safety programs include workplace assessments, for example, monitoring the indoor climate by asking the workers about complaints such as noise, draught, and temperature. Such analyses can identify physical hazards related to job position or work location and thereby provide key knowledge to preventing work-related health hazards [3]. To avoid any misinterpretation of workplace health and safety programs and to prevent further worsening of symptoms it is important to identify workers with high prevalence of indoor climate complaints along with the specific bothering factors. Knowledge concerning interindividual variation in indoor climate sensation as a consequence of chronic musculoskeletal pain is lacking
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