A common theme in the pain literature is that worker's compensation reinforces pain behavior and adversely influences treatment outcome of chronic pain patients. This study compared 110 chronic low back pain males divided into three groups: 44 receiving no compensation, 27 receiving time-limited worker's compensation, and 39 receiving unlimited social security disability benefits. All patients participated in a multimodal treatment program (e.g. nerve blocks, transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, relaxation training, biofeedback). Physician ratings of pain behavior and self-report measures of pain characteristics, activity level, and medication intake were gathered pretreatment; self-report measures were collected again approximately one year following treatment. The results showed disability patients to have a higher percentage of physician rated symptom dramatization and pain behavior and a greater usage of medication compared with the non-compensation and time-limited worker's compensation patients. At follow-up, no between group differences were found on measures of pain intensity, medication usage and activity. In general, however, more worker's compensation and non-compensation patients who were initially not working had returned to work at the time of follow-up compared with the disability patients. These results suggest that time-limited compensation may not affect treatment outcome or interfere with return-to-work chances while unlimited compensation may adversely influence the probability that patients will return to work. These findings support the notion that worker's compensation patients receiving time-limited financial benefits do not necessarily represent a 'problem' subgroup of chronic pain patients.
Hearing loss is linked to higher mortality rates, especially among workers in high-risk jobs, but using hearing aids can reduce this risk significantly.
A study of over 19,000 DOE workers found that 41.3% had hearing loss, with 15.3% using hearing aids, leading to 5,398 deaths during an 11.1-year follow-up.
Results showed that severe hearing loss increases mortality risk, while hearing aid users had a 30% lower risk of death, suggesting improvements in workers' compensation and medical benefits for noise-exposed workers are needed.
Background: This study characterized the risk of new-onset asthma among workers in Manitoba, Canada.
Methods: Accepted time loss claims from the Workers' Compensation Board of Manitoba from 2006 to 2019, containing workers' occupations and industries, were linked with administrative health data from 1996 to 2020. After restricting the cohort to the first claim per person in an occupation and applying age and coverage exclusions, the cohort comprised 142,588 person-occupation combinations.
Background: Firefighters have a higher rate of heat-related illness (HRI) compared to other occupations. Given the changing climate, firefighters' risk of occupational HRI merits attention. Therefore, we aimed to identify demographic, temporal, and geographic risk factors associated with occupational HRI in California firefighters between 2001 and 2020.
