SAN DIEGO (Reuters Health) - Pain from common conditions such as headaches and back ache costs US employers about $80 billion a year in lost productivity, according to a report presented here at the 10th World Congress on Pain.

But the bulk of the loss, or about $64 billion, is largely invisible to employers because it occurs not when workers take sick days but rather when they are on the job but in too much pain to perform up to par.

The survey is "the first to really measure the cost of pain," lead author Walter Stewart, a researcher at the Center for Work and Health at AdvancePCS in Hunt Valley, Maryland, told Reuters Health. AdvancePCS provides information on health improvement services.

"People are at work but not performing as well as they would were they pain-free," said Judith Ricci, another member of the research team.

To arrive at the estimate, the researchers conducted an ongoing telephone survey, from July 2001 to July 2002, including more than 29,000 employed and more than 1600 unemployed people ranging from 18 to 65 years old. They described pain complaints from headache, arthritis, backache and other musculoskeletal conditions as well as work absences and reduced work performance.

The researchers converted the subjects' lost productive time to dollars per worker per week, using self-reported annual salary.

"I was surprised at how pervasive pain is," Ricci says. "Over half the people we interviewed who were working reporting being in pain at least once in the past two weeks," Ricci says. Even more pain reports were received from the unemployed respondents.

The researchers conclude that pain is the most prevalent health condition in the US work force and the most costly in terms of productive work time. Headache and back pain account for the majority of on-the-job pain complaints. Pain has the most impact on the job for men, those 35 to 40 years, those with less education, African Americans and workers with high demand jobs over which they have little control

"The critical finding here is that pain is common in the workforce," Stewart says. "People bring it to work and they don't function well. And it's invisible to employers."

Reference Source 89

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