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Stories for Reprint
Arthritis Can Worsen Job Stress
By Ferdous Al-Faruque, MARRTC Staff
Many of us can relate to workplace stress, but imagine the added stress of working with arthritis. A new Canadian study finds that workplace stress in people with arthritis is mostly related to future worries about how they will be able to handle their disease and continue working.
The study by the Toronto Western Research Institute at the University of Toronto found the most stressful factors were finances, fear of being overloaded with work, concern about remaining employed, accepting the influence of the disease in everyday life, and balancing home and work responsibilities
Monique Gignac, PhD, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto and principal investigator of the study, says there is often a spillover effect between people's home and work lives.
"(This happens when) your disease is interfering with your ability to do work and your work is interfering with your ability to take good care of yourself," she explained.
The study was conducted using a questionnaire to interview 224 women and 68 men who were recruited through rheumatology clinics in Toronto and community advertising. The participants had inflammatory arthritis, osteoarthritis or both.
The researchers found that people with arthritis often modify their work, either reducing the number of hours worked or changing their hours of work. Gignac said 20 percent of the people surveyed had either changed the number of hours of work or switched to a different job "They gave up something that sometimes they were trained to do and had to take a different job so that they could remain working," she explained.
The research emphasizes the importance of finding new measurement tools for health care professionals to assess how people with arthritis are affected by workplace stress and what can be done to alleviate the stress. "I would tell (health care professionals) to talk more to their patients about employment," Gignac said. "(It's important to recognize that) people are having to make changes at work and that there may be ways clinicians can intervene earlier to deal with particular work issues."
It's also important to intervene early and find accommodations for employees so those individuals don't end up wearing themselves down and leaving the workplace.
There are relatively inexpensive changes people can make to the work environment to help them perform their work better. The use of ergonomic furniture and tools such as modified keyboards and computer mice can help people manage the physical challenges of their job.
Another issue that people with arthritis face, according to Gignac, is being able to manage their roles at home and at work. "People are going home and they are not doing anything else in their lives because they feel like they've got to go straight to bed so they have the time and energy to work," said Gignac.
Planning ahead and being organized can alleviate some of the added stress. Self-management programs offered through the Arthritis Foundation can teach these skills and instruct patients in many other ways to cope with the arthritis.
There are more than a hundred different types of arthritis known to date. Arthritis affects over 70 million Americans and is the leading cause of disability in the US.
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