Age-related vulnerability of employees to factors of the occupation environment

Introduction. When predicting individual health risks associated with a person’s profession, first of all, the state of their health, age and experience of harmful work are studied. A practical approach to studying the age-related vulnerability of a person to the factors of the working environment is the use of fatigue indicators. 

Objective: to establish age-related patterns of the influence of factors of the occupation environment on employee fatigue

Materials and methods. Three thousand eight hundred fifty-one employees of industrial enterprises, public catering enterprises, healthcare and educational organizations were examined. The employees evaluated the degree of influence of factors of the production environment on fatigue – noise, microclimate, working area air, dust in the working area air, vibration. The frequency of influence (FI) of each factor of the production environment on employee fatigue was considered an indicator of age-related vulnerability (vulnerability risk). The relative risk of exceeding the FI in older age groups of employees was calculated.

Results. In older medical workers, the relative risk (RR) of vulnerability to noise was =1.19 (0.88-1.60); to the microclimate OR=1.26 (0.96-1.64); RR due to the air of the working area =1.19 (0.92-1.54). School teachers have a significantly higher frequency of complaints about noise than doctors and nurses, and their age-related increase in vulnerability to noise was OR=1.23 (0.98-1.55). Employees of public catering enterprises showed an increase in age-related vulnerability to all environmental factors. Employees of older age groups of industrial enterprises are more vulnerable to all factors of the production environment. The values of FI in the groups of 30-49 years and 50-69 years, respectively, were: for noise, OR=1.20 (1.01-1.43) and OR=1.15(0.88-1.50); for microclimate, OR=1.21(1.04-1.39); for working area air, OR=1.02 (0.87-1.19) and OR = 1.31 (1.06-1.62).

Conclusion. Compared with the age group of 20-30 years, the probability of the influence of factors of the working environment – “noise”, “microclimate”, “air of the working area”, on the fatigue of workers increases by 10-15% at the age of 30-49 years and by 15-25% at the age of 50-60 years. 

Contribution:

Sorokin G.A. — the concept and design of the study, responsibility for the integrity of all parts of the article, collection of literature data, statistical processing, text writing;

Shilov V.V. — editing;

Chistyakov N.D. — collection and processing of observation materials.

All authors are responsible for the integrity of all parts of the manuscript and approval of the manuscript final version.

Conflict of interest. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgment. The study had no sponsorship.