Occupational stress factors and musculo-skeletal disease in patients at a rehabilitation center

Abstract

Disorders of the musculo-skeletal system are one of the main occupational diseases occurring in industrial countries and the number of reported cases is rapidly increasing, especially among the older age groups. Musculo-skeletal diseases can be influenced by a number of stress factors arising during physical work. The aim of this study is to identify the physical work stress factors, to which persons already suffering from musculo-skeletal diseases (patients at a rehabilitation center) have been exposed in their work, and, firstly, to examine whether these data can be used to predict the probability of future musculo-skeletal disorders in workers occupying this type of job, secondly, to determine how these factors interact with each other in the development of these disorders. Trained specialists in occupational medicine using a program called Medical Job-oriented Rehabilitation (MJOR), collected data on 6668 patients by means of a standardized checklist called Bavaria Rehabilitation Assessment Method (BRA). Analysis of the recursive binary partitioning trees revealed that 19 predictor variables corresponding to age and gender, plus repetitive operations, rotation in sedentary position, degree of hand force used and forced head/neck postures were good predictors for the disorders of the hand-/arm system, the cervico-brachial syndrome and the impingement syndrome of shoulder.