The panorama of future sick-leave diagnoses among young adults initially long-term sickness absent due to neck, shoulder, or back diagnoses. An 11-year prospective cohort study

Background: Little is known about future sick-leave diagnoses among individuals on long-term sickness absence. The aim of this study was to describe the panorama of sick-leave diagnoses over time among young adults initially sick-listed for ≥ 28 days due to back, neck, or shoulder diagnoses Methods: An 11-year prospective population-based cohort study including all 213 individuals in a Swedish municipality who, in 1985, were aged 25–34 years and had a new sick-leave spell ≥ 28 days due to neck, shoulder, or back diagnoses. Results: Over the 11-year period, the young adults in this cohort had 176,825 sick-leave days in 7,878 sick-leave periods (in 4,610 sick-leave spells) due to disorders in 17 of the 18 ICD-8 diagnostic categories (International Classification of Diseases, Revision 8). Musculoskeletal or mental diagnoses accounted for most of the sick-leave days, whereas most of the sick-leave periods were due to musculoskeletal, respiratory, or infectious disorders, or to unclassified symptoms. Most cohort members had had four to eight different sick-leave diagnoses over the 11 years, although some had had up to 11 diagnoses. Only two individuals (1%) had been sickness absent solely due to musculoskeletal diagnoses. Conclusion: Although the young adults initially were sick listed with back, neck, or shoulder diagnoses, their sickness absence during the follow up were due to a wide variety of other medical diagnoses. It might be that the ill-health content of sickness absence due to back pain is greater than usually assumed. More research on prognoses of sick-leave diagnoses among long-term sick listed is warranted. Background In Sweden, as well as in many other industrialized countries, sickness absence is considered to be a major public health issue [1-4]. Until recently, musculoskeletal disorders have been the most common reason for sickness absence and disability pension (DP) in the working population [1]. Even though these medical conditions are likely to be recurrent and long-lasting, and can often result in DP [5], very little is known about the prognoses of the patients sick listed due to musculoskeletal disorders [1]. In fact, there is even a lack of applicable methods to describe such prognoses due to several methodological challenges. One major difficulty in this context is associated with the recurrence of sickness absence and the unePublished: 14 July 2009 BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders 2009, 10:84 doi:10.1186/1471-2474-10-84 Received: 29 August 2008 Accepted: 14 July 2009 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2474/10/84 © 2009 Vaez et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.