Overview

Abstract (English)

The Canadian Health Measures Survey (CHMS) provides an opportunity to examine occupational and environmental exposures and their relationships to measured health outcomes or characteristics that may themselves predict future morbidity and mortality. Shift work is an occupational exposure of emerging interest, with the potential for wide-ranging effects on population health. This submission will discuss the design and development of a Research Data Centre (RDC) project using CHMS data to test a hypothesized relationship between shift work and indicators of metabolic health, and the challenges inherent in such analyses. When pooled, the three CHMS cycles currently deployed to the RDCs represent a sample of more than 17,000 participants. However, many participants are are excluded from labour force related questions due to age or employment status. Furthermore, after Cycle 2, the question about “usual shift worked” was dropped from the CHMS, leaving a pooled sample of approximately 5,970 with valid responses to usual shift worked. Of these, approximately 18%, are exposed to shift work, defined as regular night, evening or rotating shifts. Those working regular night shifts (often called graveyard) represent only 2%. Despite the attrition of the sample when subset to those eligible to respond to the “usual shift worked” question, the CHMS holds promise to address questions about the relationship between shift work and health in the Canadian population. Due to cell size concerns, cross-relationships with common health outcomes, such as overweight/obesity (approximately 57% of measured participants in Cycle 1) may be most practicable for study.

Abstract (French)

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