Ann Work Expo Health
Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, School of Public Health, Université de Montréal, 2375, Chemin de la Côte Ste-Catherine, Montréal, Québec H3T 1A8, Canada.
Published: July 2019
Background: Work histories generally cover all jobs held for ≥1 year. However, it may be time and cost prohibitive to conduct a detailed exposure assessment for each such job. While disregarding short-term jobs can reduce the assessment burden, this can be problematic if those jobs contribute important exposure information towards understanding disease aetiology.
Objective: To characterize short-term jobs, defined as lasting more than 1 year, but less than 2 years, in a population-based study conducted in Montreal, Canada.
Methods: In 2005-2012, we collected work histories for some 4000 participants in a case-control study of prostate cancer. Overall, subjects had held 19 462 paid jobs lasting ≥1 year, including 3655 short-term jobs. Using information from interviews and from the Canadian Classification and Dictionary of Occupations, we characterized short-term jobs and compared them to jobs held ≥2 years.
Results: Short-term jobs represented <4% of subjects' work years on average. Forty-five per cent of subjects had at least one short-term job; of these, 49% had one, 24% had two, and 27% had at least three. Half of all short-term jobs had been held before the age of 24. Short-term jobs entailed more often exposure to fumes, odours, dust, and/or poor ventilation than longer jobs (17 versus 13%), as well as outdoor work (10 versus 5%) and heavy physical activity (16 versus 12%).
Conclusions: Short-term jobs occurred often in early careers and more frequently entailed potentially hazardous exposures than longer-held jobs. However, as they represented a small proportion of work years, excluding them should have a marginal impact on lifetime exposure assessment.
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Source |
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6655408 | PMC |
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/annweh/wxz026 | DOI Listing |
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