ON ASSESSMENT OF THE PROBABILITY OF VARIOUS COMORBIDITIES IN WORKERS OF ALUMINUM AND REFRACTORY INDUSTRIES

Abstract

Recent findings in occupational medicine have demonstrated that physical diseases are one of the main factors determining poor health of industrial workers. Non-occupational disorders also have a significant impact on timing of occupational disease onset. Our objectives were to assess the likelihood of comorbidities in cases of occupational diseases of various etiologies and to compare their profiles. The study was conducted retrospectively. We created a database of medical records of aluminum and refractory workers and analyzed all diagnoses and systemic disorders identified during the clinical examination of these patients using SPSS Statistics 23. The comorbidity index was used to determine the degree of the disease burden of the subjects. We assessed transnosological and transsystemic multimorbidity, as well as the relationship between multimorbidity and occupational diseases. The Kolmogorov – Smirnov test was used to test the null hypothesis that the set of data came from a normal distribution, after which parametric estimation, Student’s t-test, and one-way analysis of variance were applied for data analysis. We established comorbidities that were significantly more frequent among the patients suffering from fluorosis or silicosis. Exposure to occupational hazards in different industries affects the profile of comorbidity. We observed a pronounced polysystemic nature of lesions in aluminum industry workers and the predominance of comorbid diseases of the respiratory system in refractory workers. The level of multimorbidity among the workers of the refractory industry was significantly lower than that in the aluminum production, thus showing a more pronounced negative impact of the combined occupational risk factors in the latter on workers’ health. © Budkar L.N., Gurvich V.B., Mordas E.Yu., Obukhova T.Yu., Solodushkin S.I., Shmonina O.G., Karpova E.A. Chubikova K.S., 2024