Understanding the impact of psychosocial working conditions on workers’ health: We have come a long way, but are we there yet?

Abstract

This issue of the journal includes a meta-review, ie, a systematic review of systematic reviews, summarizing the published evidence on the associations between exposure to adverse psychosocial working conditions and risk of developing diseases or disorders during the past 20 years (1). Although the authors allowed inclusion of reviews reporting results from cross-sectional studies, the majority of the included reviews were restricted to prospective cohort studies – the gold standard method in psychosocial occupational epidemiology. We commend the authors for their succinct summary of the current knowledge on the topic, encompassing this multitude of exposures and outcomes in one single paper. The paper finds that there is consistent evidence of associations between certain psychosocial working conditions (job strain, effort-reward imbalance, job insecurity, long working hours) and certain health conditions (cardiovascular diseases and mental disorders, in particular depression). The paper also identifies the lack of studies concerning numerous other working and health conditions, as elegantly depicted in their figure 1, showing the presence or absence of reviews concerning all combinations of the included exposures and outcomes.