Estimating occupational disease burden: a way forward.

Estimates of occupational disease burden provide important information on which effective policy and regulations can be developed. However, there is no direct way that these data can be obtained, and most burden estimates are derived by merging different data from diverse sources to synthesize estimates of the number of people made ill or who have died from workplace exposures. In recent years, several research groups have published estimates of occupational health burden at national or global scales; these are not always consistent.

Occupational exposure science.

This commentary describes developments in occupational exposure science over the last 30 yr, highlighting theoretical descriptions of inhalation, dermal, inadvertent ingestion, and ocular exposure in the workplace and how they are intertwined. In particular, the way that we define "exposure" in the theory determines what is and is not measured in workplace investigations, and what contextual information about the work and the environment is recorded alongside the exposure measurements. Central to all the theoretical models described is the unifying concept of uptake, or the mass of hazardous substance entering the body by different routes over a workday.

Exposure assessment for repeated sub-concussive head impacts in soccer: The HEalth and Ageing Data IN the Game of football (HEADING) study.

The purpose of this paper was to develop exposure estimates for repetitive sub-concussive head impacts (RSHI) for use in epidemiological analyses. We used a questionnaire to collect lifetime history of heading and other head contacts associated with training and playing football from 159 former footballers all members of the English professional football association. We used linear mixed effect regression with player as the random effect, to model the number of headers, blows to the head and head-to-head impacts as a function of potential exposure affecting factors, which were treated as the fixed effects.