Background: Asthma is becoming more prevalent with large numbers of individuals suffering from work-exacerbated asthma.
Aims: To examine the characteristics of workplace exposures and working days lost in relation to work-exacerbated asthma (WEA) in a workers' compensation population.
Methods: An analysis of accepted workers' compensation asthma claims in Ontario over a 5-year period. Claims among the top three industry groups were categorized based on working time lost of 1 day or less, 2-5 days and 6 days or more. Attributable agents were subdivided into dusts, smoke, chemicals and sensitizers.
Results: Among the asthma claims, 72% (645) fulfilled criteria for WEA from their history. The commonest industry groups were services, education and health care, with 270 claims that met our analysis requirements. Within these industry groups, education had a lower proportion of workers with short exacerbations (missing 1 day or less: 27%) while the health care industry had a higher than expected proportion of short exacerbations (55%). The agents to which WEA was attributed differed across the groups, with dusts having the highest proportion in the education group (65%), smoke in the service industry (34%) and sensitizers in health care (41%). Those agents more commonly attributed to exacerbations tended to have lower rates of prolonged exacerbation compared with less commonly involved agents.
Conclusions: The morbidity of WEA and the type of agents to which it was attributed varied between industry groups.
Keywords: Asthma; education; health care; industry; occupational; service; work-exacerbated asthma..