Developing a General Population Job Exposure Matrix for Studies of Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders

Details

• Personal Author:
  Evanoff B
• Description:
  Exposure assessment is a major methodological challenge for studies of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) and other conditions affected by workplace physical exposures. Job-Exposure Matrices (JEMs) can provide efficient estimation of current and past exposures, particularly in large-scale general population studies where it is often infeasible to perform detailed individual level data collection. While the use of JEMs to study associations between health outcomes and workplace physical exposures is increasing, their use is relatively uncommon, the number of studied exposure variables is limited, and little work has examined the validity or comparability of existing JEMs. This project used data from a large French prospective cohort study (CONSTANCES) to create a new general population JEM based on self-reported data from >35,000 adults working in more than 400 different jobs, representative of the French working population. This JEM created homogenous exposure groups that could differentiate exposures between different jobs and provide unbiased exposure estimates. This created new possibilities to study the effects of current and past workplace physical exposures on a variety of health conditions within a large general population study. After creating the new JEM, we conducted analyses to validate its exposure estimates and to compare exposure estimates between different JEMs and with directly observed exposures of individual workers. We found moderate to substantial agreement between the exposure estimates given by our new French JEM and an existing American JEM. These findings inform cross-national comparisons of study results and may support use of general population JEMs outside their countries of origin. We compared agreement between exposure estimates provided by both JEMs to observed exposure measures from individual workers from a large American cohort, and found good agreement at the level of the job. We then tested the ability of the JEMs to replicate known disease-exposure associations. We found that JEM derived exposures predicted current pain at the wrist, low back, shoulder, and knee in the French cohort. We also studied incident Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) and found that exposures estimated with the American JEM provided similar exposure-disease associations for CTS compared with associations obtained using the more labor intensive 'gold standard' method of individual worker observations. While JEMs have a number of limitations, our results show that they provide useful and valid exposure estimates, and are particularly useful in situations where exposure data could not otherwise be obtained, such as large existing datasets and in studies of past exposures. Our new JEM has been used to study cumulative physical exposures in published or ongoing studies of musculoskeletal disorders. In related publications, we have also described how JEMs can improve risk factor surveillance and other public health and occupational disease care by providing a basic assessment of exposures relevant to different health conditions. [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  Ergonomics Mining Occupational Health Safety
• Keywords:
  Carpal Tunnel Syndrome CTS JEM Job Exposure Matrix MSD Musculoskeletal Disorders Public Health Surveillance
• Series:
  Grant Final Reports
• Publisher:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Grant
• Genre:
  Final Grant Report
• Place as Subject:
  Missouri ; OSHA Region 7
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Division:
  OEP - Office of Extramural Programs
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  1-37
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20064478
• NTIS Accession Number:
  PB2022-100418
• Citation:
  Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, R01-OH-011076, 2021 Nov; :1-37
• Contact Point Address:
  Bradley Evanoff, MD, MPH Division of General Medical Sciences, School of Medicine Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 8005, 660 S. Euclid Ave St. Louis, MO 63110
• Email:
  bevanoff@wustl.edu
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2022
• Performing Organization:
  Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Start Date:
  20160901
• Source Full Name:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• End Date:
  20190831
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:783bfae54bc7573e93ab352b3d4e5ea1e05de9708ce68ef8b54f6ecd20d2a5cef20467f53a619bb9c7872520f0f3be2f7ed81f3858193c5d3ce6da12ab9aca1f
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/219097/cdc_219097_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 2.37 MB ]