BACKGROUND This study is a part of the interdisciplinary project The Office Illness Project in Northern Sweden, which was initiated with a questionnaire study in late 1988. Previously published results from the project have shown that facial skin symptoms reported among visual display terminal (VDT) workers are associated with a number of exogenous factors. This part of the project investigated...

OBJECTIVES To identify psychosocial factors that Black women think should be addressed in prenatal care assessment and develop a Prenatal Event History Calendar to assess these factors. DESIGN A qualitative descriptive study. SETTING Two inner city hospital prenatal care clinics in Southeastern Michigan. PARTICIPANTS Twenty-two Black women who had attended at least 2 prenatal care visits....

BACKGROUND Musculoskeletal disorders are a widespread affliction in the nursing profession. Back or neck-pain-related disability of nursing staff is mainly attributed to physical and psychosocial risk factors. OBJECTIVES To investigate which-and to what extent-physical and psychosocial risk factors are associated with neck/back-pain-related disability in nursing, and to assess the role of the...

BACKGROUND Uncontrolled studies suggest that psychosocial factors and health behaviour may be important in asthma death. METHODS A community based case-control study of 533 cases, comprising 78% of all asthma deaths under age 65 years and 533 hospital controls individually matched for age, district and asthma admission date corresponding to date of death was undertaken in seven regions of Bri...

An Expert Working Group of the National Heart Foundation of Australia undertook a review of systematic reviews of the evidence relating to major psychosocial risk factors to assess whether there are independent associations between any of the factors and the development and progression of coronary heart disease (CHD), or the occurrence of acute cardiac events. The expert group concluded that (i...

Psychosocial stress is a nontraditional risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality that may respond to behavioral or psychosocial interventions. To date, studies applying such interventions have reported a wide range of success rates in treatment or prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD). The authors focus on a natural medicine approach that research indicates reduces both psych...

This discussion paper is well-written and up to date. A strong feature is its attention to the biological and behavioural mechanisms that connect exposure to certain job characteristics with illness. First, some remarks are made with respect to the definition and measurement of psychosocial risk factors. It is concluded that we do know which factors in work are major risk factors for stress and...

PURPOSE The present study examined the profile of physical and psychosocial changes that occur in physiotherapy intervention when patients also participate in a psychosocial intervention. The psychosocial intervention, delivered by physiotherapists, was designed to target catastrophic thinking, fear of pain, perceived disability, and depression. METHODS The study sample consisted of 48 indivi...