Source: Annual Congress 2010 - Occupational asthma
Disease area: Airway diseases

Abstract

Occupational risk factors provoking the debut of asthma are difficult to assess in population based studies partly due to the initial unspecific symptoms. The time between entering a risky job and occurrence of symptoms is therefore rarely studied.
We have made an attempt to analyze the coincidence between entering a risky job and reporting first asthma attack.
In a population based survey of persons aged 20-44 years 1.191 participated in a clinical examination. Of these 360 reported ever having asthma. The asthmatics reported the age of their first asthma attack and all persons gave a detailed job history with jobtitle as well as month of start and end of the job of all employments within the last 10 years of more than three months.
Information of first asthma attack and time of each job was transformed to dates and linked. Subjects reporting asthma before first job were excluded leaving 95 incident cases during a job. Jobs were coded according to 26 –category risk-job and the asthma Job Exposure Matrix (JEM).
A survival analysis using a Cox-regression was used with days from start of job to reported attack as time variable and job or JEM category as well as sex as independent variables. To this was added a logistic regression of debut and the actual job.
No significant effect of any jobcode or JEM main group was seen. JEM categories of high and low molecular weight all showed hazard ratios below 1 while the jobcodes varied.
This simple way of testing incident cases may be useful in large materials. However the results are limited by the imprecision of recall of first attack. Using register data of drug prescription or admission to hospital and employment registers may offer some benefit.

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J. Baelum, J. Rasmussen, T. Sigsgaard, L. Skadhauge, D. Sherson, G. Thomsen, O. Omland (Haderslev, Vejle, Esbjerg, Aalborg, Denmark). An analysis of occupational risk factors for incident cases of asthma. Eur Respir J 2010; 36: Suppl. 54, 1462

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