Objective Cold exposure is associated with an increased prevalence of musculoskeletal pain. We found earlier that employees spending ≥25% of their working time in cold environments had higher odds of chronic musculoskeletal pain. There was a consistent tendency of higher odds for increasing frequency of feeling cold. Cold exposure can also interfere with work performance. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate if the frequency of cold experience was associated with impaired work performance.

Methods We used data from the sixth survey of the Tromsø study (2007–2008). Participants aged 30–67 years who reported to work in a cold environment ≥25% of the time, were not retired, not receiving full-time disability benefits and without missing values were included, leading to 793 participants. Feeling cold was categorized into never, sometimes and often feeling cold. Work performance variables comprised of binary variables of impaired control of movement, heavy physical work and long-lasting physical work, finger dexterity and –sensitivity. Associations between feeling cold at work and self-reported work performance were examined with Poisson-regression, adjusted for age, sex, smoking and body mass index.

Results Both prevalence of impaired work performance and associations between frequency of feeling cold and impaired work performance were consistently lower for those never feeling cold and higher for those feeling cold often, compared to those feeling cold sometimes. In the fully adjusted model, the strongest associations were found for impaired long-lasting work performance with prevalence ratio (PR) 0,35 (95%CI 0,20–0,62) for never feeling cold and PR 1,81 (95%CI 1,35–2,42) for feeling cold often. For impaired heavy work PRs were 0,53 (95%CI 0,31–0,90) and 2,13 (95%CI 1,50–3,04), respectively.

Conclusion In this cross-sectional study on cold-exposed workers, cold experience frequency was associated with work performance with the tendency of increased work impairment with increasing frequency of feeling cold.