#0015 Pain, unhealthy days and poor perceived health among Japanese workers
Growing Pains: Japanese Study Finds Links Between Pain and Unhealthy Days
Pain is a frequently reported problem among workers. it affects the ability to work and increases the risk of unemployment and subsequent poverty. Many companies and institutions are struggling to cope with the loss of labor productivity caused by working with pain.
Because a population's health should not only be gauged in terms of lives saved, but also in terms of improving the health‐related quality of life (HRQOL), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), US, have developed a tool, the HRQOL‐4 questionnaire, which can be answered by individuals independently to assess their quality of life.
To test whether there was a link between pain and overall quality of life, we administered the HRQOL-4 tool on 1360 Japanese workers in Kyushu, Japan. The participants were also asked questions that helped to localize and quantify any pain (on a numeric scale from 1-10) that the workers were experiencing.
As expected, our study showed that pain was a strong contributor to a lower quality of life. Compared to workers who did not experience any pain, workers with pain had 2.85 more physically unhealthy days, 2.25 more mentally unhealthy days, 4.41 overall unhealthy days, and 1.9 days with activity limitation in a month. Moreover, workers with higher pain intensity reported more days with limited activity. We also found that workers who reported frequent headaches had more unhealthy days than did workers who reported other types of pain such as neck/shoulder, back, or joint pain.
Interestingly, in addition to affecting physical health, bodily pain greatly influences mental health. In fact, a recent WHO study showed that individuals with persistent pain have an 80% higher chance to suffer from depression or anxiety and are more than twice as likely to have difficulty working. Japanese workers tend not to take sick leave owing to cultural norms. Therefore, the presence of pain‐afflicted workers needs to be accounted for when projecting productivity in a company. Lack of workers' pain management will adversely affect the workers' quality of life and the company's productivity in turn.
Monitoring workers' HRQOL gives public health and occupational health agencies greater insights to assess, protect, and promote not only workers' physical health, but also their mental health and overall quality of life.
Link to the original journal article:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/1348-9585.12092
Title of the paper:
Pain, unhealthy days and poor perceived health among Japanese workers
Authors:
Odgerel Chimed‐Ochir, Yuko Mine, Yoshihisa Fujino
