RSI In The Workplace In Europe Is Probably Overstated

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Main Category: Pain / Anesthetics
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Article Date: 04 Dec 2007 - 11:00 PDT

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Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) in Europe is probably not as prevalent as is being currently stated, according to an article published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine (BMJ).

The researchers wonder how useful and appropriate it is to use the Labour Force Surveys of occupational ill health - surveys which are commonly used by European governments as a reliable data source to plan their occupational health strategies.

In these surveys, people are asked whether they think their illness/injury is job-related. According to this source, there are over 2 million people in the United Kingdom whose ill health is job-related.

The researchers sent e-mails to 5,000 patients from five GP (general practice) registers in Britain - they were chosen randomly. They asked the participants what the physical nature of their job was, their mental and general state of health, whether they suffered from RSI, and why they though they had it (what caused it).

They then used the feedbacks to calculate the fraction of arm pain likely to be caused or made worse by arm straining activities. The population attributable fraction (PAF) was 14%. 1,800 participants responded fully to the e-mailed questions - 46% of them said they had had arm pain during the previous 12 month period. 54% of those that had had arm pain during the previous twelve months believed their symptoms were caused or aggravated by their jobs - this figure was over triple the PAF calculated by the researchers.

This discrepancy was almost twice as great for people under 50, compared to people over 50. The discrepancy was greater still among people with poorer mental and general health.

The researchers concluded that simply asking people whether they think their RSI is work-related will probably inflate the total numbers.

The authors wrote "Statistics from Labour Force Surveys are widely quoted as evidence for the scale of occupational illness. However, their validity as a measure of the burden of disease caused by work is questionable."

"How common is repetitive strain injury?"
Keith T Palmer, Isabel Reading, Michael Calnan, David Coggon
Occup Environ Med. Published Online First: 4 December 2007.
doi:10.1136/oem.2007.035378
Click here to view abstract online

Written by - Christian Nordqvist
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