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Does unemployment contribute to poorer health-related quality of life among Swedish adults?
BACKGROUND: Previous studies have shown that unemployment has negative impacts on various aspects of health. However, little is known about the effect of unemployment on health-related quality of life. Our aim was to examine how unemployment impacts upon health-related quality of life among Swedish...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6489216/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31035994 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-6825-y |
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author | Norström, Fredrik Waenerlund, Anna-Karin Lindholm, Lars Nygren, Rebecka Sahlén, Klas-Göran Brydsten, Anna |
author_facet | Norström, Fredrik Waenerlund, Anna-Karin Lindholm, Lars Nygren, Rebecka Sahlén, Klas-Göran Brydsten, Anna |
author_sort | Norström, Fredrik |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Previous studies have shown that unemployment has negative impacts on various aspects of health. However, little is known about the effect of unemployment on health-related quality of life. Our aim was to examine how unemployment impacts upon health-related quality of life among Swedish adults, and to investigate these effects on population subgroups defined by education level, marital status, previous health, and gender. METHODS: As part of a cross-sectional study, a questionnaire was sent to 2500 randomly selected individuals aged 20 to 64 years living in Sweden in 2016. The questionnaire included the EuroQol 5 dimensions (EQ-5D) instrument and was answered by 967 individuals (39%). Quality-adjusted life year (QALY) scores were derived from the EQ-5D responses. Of the respondents, 113 were unemployed and 724 were employed. We used inverse probability-weighted propensity scores in our analyses to estimate a risk difference. Gender, age, education level, marital status, and previous health were used as covariates in our analyses. RESULTS: There was a statistically significant lower QALY score by 0.096 points for the unemployed compared to the employed. There were also statistically significant more problems due to unemployment for usual activities (6.6% more), anxiety/depression (23.6% more), and EQ-5D’s Visual Analogue Scale (7.5 point lower score). Grouped analyses indicated a larger negative health effect from becoming unemployed for men, those who are married, and young individuals. CONCLUSIONS: In our study, we show that the health deterioration from unemployment is likely to be large, as our estimated effect implies an almost 10% worse health (in absolute terms) from being unemployed compared to being employed. This further highlights that unemployment is a public health problem that needs more focus. Our study also raises further demands for determining for whom unemployment has the most negative effects and thus suggesting groups of individuals who are in greatest need for labor market measures. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-019-6825-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6489216 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-64892162019-06-05 Does unemployment contribute to poorer health-related quality of life among Swedish adults? Norström, Fredrik Waenerlund, Anna-Karin Lindholm, Lars Nygren, Rebecka Sahlén, Klas-Göran Brydsten, Anna BMC Public Health Research Article BACKGROUND: Previous studies have shown that unemployment has negative impacts on various aspects of health. However, little is known about the effect of unemployment on health-related quality of life. Our aim was to examine how unemployment impacts upon health-related quality of life among Swedish adults, and to investigate these effects on population subgroups defined by education level, marital status, previous health, and gender. METHODS: As part of a cross-sectional study, a questionnaire was sent to 2500 randomly selected individuals aged 20 to 64 years living in Sweden in 2016. The questionnaire included the EuroQol 5 dimensions (EQ-5D) instrument and was answered by 967 individuals (39%). Quality-adjusted life year (QALY) scores were derived from the EQ-5D responses. Of the respondents, 113 were unemployed and 724 were employed. We used inverse probability-weighted propensity scores in our analyses to estimate a risk difference. Gender, age, education level, marital status, and previous health were used as covariates in our analyses. RESULTS: There was a statistically significant lower QALY score by 0.096 points for the unemployed compared to the employed. There were also statistically significant more problems due to unemployment for usual activities (6.6% more), anxiety/depression (23.6% more), and EQ-5D’s Visual Analogue Scale (7.5 point lower score). Grouped analyses indicated a larger negative health effect from becoming unemployed for men, those who are married, and young individuals. CONCLUSIONS: In our study, we show that the health deterioration from unemployment is likely to be large, as our estimated effect implies an almost 10% worse health (in absolute terms) from being unemployed compared to being employed. This further highlights that unemployment is a public health problem that needs more focus. Our study also raises further demands for determining for whom unemployment has the most negative effects and thus suggesting groups of individuals who are in greatest need for labor market measures. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-019-6825-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2019-04-29 /pmc/articles/PMC6489216/ /pubmed/31035994 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-6825-y Text en © The Author(s). 2019 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Norström, Fredrik Waenerlund, Anna-Karin Lindholm, Lars Nygren, Rebecka Sahlén, Klas-Göran Brydsten, Anna Does unemployment contribute to poorer health-related quality of life among Swedish adults? |
title | Does unemployment contribute to poorer health-related quality of life among Swedish adults? |
title_full | Does unemployment contribute to poorer health-related quality of life among Swedish adults? |
title_fullStr | Does unemployment contribute to poorer health-related quality of life among Swedish adults? |
title_full_unstemmed | Does unemployment contribute to poorer health-related quality of life among Swedish adults? |
title_short | Does unemployment contribute to poorer health-related quality of life among Swedish adults? |
title_sort | does unemployment contribute to poorer health-related quality of life among swedish adults? |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6489216/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31035994 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-6825-y |
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