Chest
Occupational and Environmental Lung DiseaseRisk of Asthma Among Finnish Patients With Occupational Rhinitis
Section snippets
Study Population
The study population consisted of nonasthmatic patients entered into the Finnish Register of Occupational Diseases because of an occupational disease in from 1988 to 1999. Those reported to have occupational rhinitis (n = 3,637) were compared with those reported to have an occupational disease other than occupational rhinitis, asthma, allergic alveolitis, or allergic contact dermatitis (n = 31,457). The term reference population is hereafter used to for the latter group. The reference
Results
Of the 3,637 patients with occupational rhinitis, 420 (11.6%) received diagnoses of asthma during the follow-up period compared with 972 diagnoses of asthma (3.1%) among the 31,457 persons in the reference population. The crude incidence rate of asthma was 19 per 1,000 population per year for those with occupational rhinitis and 4.0 per 1,000 population per year for the reference population. When only those persons with occupational rhinitis that had been accepted by the insurance system were
Discussion
We found a clearly elevated risk of asthma among patients with occupational rhinitis compared with patients with other occupational diseases. Unfortunately, we did not have systematic information on exposure circumstances after the occupational rhinitis had been reported. For those who later contracted occupational asthma (ie, 37% of all those patients with asthma), the comparison of job titles at the time of notification of occupational rhinitis and the notification of occupational asthma
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We are indebted to Kari Toivola and Timo Pitkonen of the Finnish Social Insurance Institution, and to Ilpo Mäkinen and Anja Saalo of the Finnish Register of Occupational Diseases for their assistance in building the data files. We thank Ms. Georgianna Oja for the linguistic revision of the manuscript.
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Cited by (0)
The study was financially supported by a grant from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Department for Promotion of Welfare and Health.