Workers’ sick days may help predict early death risk

London, October 3: The number of sick leaves a worker avails could help predict if he runs a risk of an early death, according to the results of a new British study.

Employees who avail offs for long spells even for common conditions like flu are far more likely to die before their co-workers who do not take such sick leaves, the study suggests.

The researchers from the University College, London recruited 6,500 civil servants in the three-year long study. Sickness records of employees between 1985 and 1988 were compared with mortality rates until 2004. Overall 288 people died during the study.

Comparisons revealed that employees who were off sick for more than seven days at a stretch, even once over three years, were 66 percent more likely to die prematurely.

Making the situation more critical, employees off with problems like heart disease are four times more likely to die prematurely compared to their colleagues who availed no such leaves.

Those down with psychiatric problems were over twice as likely to die early. Likewise, workers who underwent surgery during the availed sick leaves were more than twice as likely to die early, researchers tracked.

Surprisingly, absenteeism due to common respiratory problems and infections were also associated with an increased risk of death, the researchers said.

Advocating the need for regular health follow-up, study’s lead researcher, Jenny Head, a statistician at University College London noted, "It would be useful for this information to be collected because we could identify groups with high risk of serious health problems."

"It is not just down to serious medical conditions but it seems this relationship is seen across a wide range of common health problems," Head marked. "This appears to be a good early marker for people going on to develop more long-term serious illnesses."

The results of the study feature in the current issue of the British Medical Journal.