Article Text
Abstract
Objective Many studies suggest that working conditions may have an impact on health, including sleep. One of the main limitations inthe literature, however, is that studies have explored a limited number of occupational exposures and have not addressed the issue of multiple exposures. Our objective was to study the associations of a large variety of occupational exposures with sleep problems, and to assess the impact of multiple occupational exposures on this outcome.
Methods The study sample consisted of 20430 employees aged 15–65 years (8579 men, 11851 women) included in the representative sample of the working population from the 2016 French national survey on working conditions. Participants were classified as having sleep problems if they reported sleep disturbances and/or sleep medication, at least several times a week. Occupational exposures were: 21 psychosocial work factors (PWFs) further grouped in five dimensions (work demands, work organization and job content, interpersonal relations and leadership, work-individual interface, workplace violence), four working time/hours factors and four physico-chemical exposures. Weighted robust Poisson regressions were performed to study the associations between occupational exposures and sleep problems after adjustment for covariates, in men and women separately.
Results Among the studied working time/hours factors, only night work among women was associated with sleep problems, while most of psychosocial work factors and physico-chemical exposures were significantly associated with sleep problems. Stronger exposure-outcome associations were found in men for some PWFs. The odds of sleep problems increased with increasing number of exposures for most dimensions of PWFs, and with increasing number of physico-chemical exposures (non-significant trend in women).
Conclusion Psychosocial and physico-chemical exposures were found to be associated with sleep problems, and the higher the number of exposures, the higher the odds of sleep problems. More studies are needed on multiple occupational exposures in association with sleep problems among working populations.