A study conducted in Finland and published in the Archives of Public Health finds that chronic and multisite pain are associated with sickness absence among younger employees, especially women and those with poorer mental health.
]. The findings further confirm the significance of pain chronicity and number of pain sites to the risk of SA in this younger age group, and the central role of concurrent poorer mental health to the risk of long-term SA.
In our study population, chronic pain was clearly associated with long-term SA, but no association between acute pain and long-term SA days was observed. However, acute pain was associated with the total number of SA days, which include shorter SA spells. This finding was expected, as acute self-limiting pain conditions may cause temporary work disability but less likely lead to long-term SA.
Most employees reporting chronic pain had multisite pain and we observed a clear association between multisite pain and SA, particularly long-term SA, among employees with poorer mental health. The only previous study we identified using a similar approach and register-based SA data, shows partly contrasting results [].
Concurrent pain and poorer mental health have been studied also in relation to other indicators of work disability than SA, and the results are in line with ours. In a prospective study of 50–61-year-old employees from the U.S., the association of concurrent severe pain and depressive symptoms with self-reported work-limiting health problems was examined during a six-year follow-up [].
We found clear gender differences in the prevalence of pain and SA, as in previous population-based and occupational studies [
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