Incidence Rates and Predictors of Recurrent Long-Term Mental Sickness Absence Due to Common Mental Disorders.
Matthew Mulder, Robin Kok, Bart Aben and 1 others
PMID 39066861WHAT IT FOUND
After a long-term absence for a common mental disorder, 15.6% of employees had another long-term mental absence within three years.
Mood or anxiety disorders were associated with more recurrence than adjustment disorders; age, gender, company size and full-time equivalent were not.
Key findings
01Within three years after full return to work, 15.6% of employees had a recurrent long-term mental absence episode, and the median time to recurrence was 317 days.
02After accounting for other measured variables, employees whose first long-term mental absence was due to mood or anxiety disorders had higher recurrence rates than those whose first absence was due to adjustment disorders (28.1% and 38.7% higher, respectively).
03A longer first absence was associated with lower recurrence at full return to work: each additional month corresponded to a 4.3% lower recurrence rate, but the association faded by two years.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Employees who changed employers were lost to follow-up, so a recurrence outside the records may have been missed; if higher-risk employees changed jobs more often, recurrence rates could be underestimated. The routine records were not exhaustive, so an episode labelled as the first in this study could already have been a recurrence, although any later episode was still counted as a recurrence. First absence length and job tenure change over time, which could bias the models; employees with longer first absences were more often lost to follow-up, although shortening follow-up to one year did not change the duration association. 332 employees were removed for administrative errors and 267 were excluded for missing data.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that a longer first absence prevents recurrence. This was an observational association, and employees with longer first absences were more likely to be lost to follow-up, which could distort the finding.
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