Abstract

Improving health and safety at work has been an important issue for the European Union since the 1980s. The existing literature supports that shift work is associated with multiple indicators of poor health but frequently neglects the potential impact of occupational hazards. This study aims at describing and comparing the exposure to different workplace hazards among shift and other workers before and after 1980. Exposure to different workplace hazards (noise, dust, pollutant, and other physical stressors) were analyzed among 119,413 participants from the UK Biobank cohort. After stratifying the analyses before and after 1980, exposure was compared between shift and other workers. Potential confounding variables (sex, age, ethnicity, education level, occupational category, and neuroticism) were adjusted for in the log-binomial regression. Shift workers had a higher prevalence ratio (PR) than other workers of being exposed to almost all identified hazards both before or after 1980. They were also more likely to be exposed to multiple hazards compared to other workers, both before 1980 (PR: 1.25; 95% CI: 1.21–1.30) and after 1980 (PR: 1.34; 95% CI: 1.30–1.38). The prevalence of all measured risk factors was higher after 1980 than before 1980 among shift workers. Of note, the work environment has improved overall for other workers. Our findings suggest that changes at the workplace have benefited other workers more than shift workers as they are still more exposed to all occupational hazards.

Highlights

  • High occupational exposures to physically hazardous conditions are important risk factors for the development of non-communicable diseases [1,2,3,4]

  • Contradictory with what we might have expected, our results indicate that the prevalence of being exposed to different risk factors was higher after 1980 than before 1980 for the shift workers, while the work environment has been overall improved for other workers

  • We found higher risks of being exposed to all occupational hazardous conditions among shift workers compared with non-shift workers

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Summary

Introduction

High occupational exposures to physically hazardous conditions are important risk factors for the development of non-communicable diseases [1,2,3,4]. Among these hazards, there are physical factors such as noise or extreme temperatures and exposure to chemical factors such as paints, asbestos, and pesticides that are known or suspected to be related to long-term diseases [5,6,7,8]. Monitoring exposures to different physical and chemical agents should be a priority, both for improving work conditions and health. Several findings throughout the literature review supported that shift work is associated with multiple indicators of poor health and

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