Sickness absence and disability pension trajectories in childhood cancer survivors and references- a Swedish prospective cohort study

Abstract

Background: Childhood cancer survivors are at high risk of chronic health conditions. We aimed to explore future long-term sickness absence and disability pension in young adult childhood cancer survivors and matched references.

Methods: We performed a prospective cohort study using microdata from five Swedish nationwide registers. Among all individuals born 1976-1998 and living in Sweden, we included 3632 childhood cancer survivors and 17,468 matched references that could be followed-up for 15, 10, or 5 years, respectively. A group-based trajectory model was applied to identify trajectories of mean annual sickness absence and/or disability pension days (SADP) in each sub-cohort, with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Potential risk factors for trajectory belonging were explored using χ2 test and multinomial logistic regression.

Results: Most young adult childhood cancer survivors (90.2-96.5%) and references (97.4-98.8%) followed a No SADP trajectory. A larger proportion of childhood cancer survivors than references followed a Moderate (33-102 days/year) or High (115-260 days/year) SADP trajectory (15-year follow-up cohorts: Moderate 4.6% versus 1.2%; High 5.1% versus 1.5%). Childhood cancer survivors of central nervous system (CNS) tumors were at higher risk of the High SADP trajectory than childhood cancer survivors of hematological or non-CNS solid tumors (hematological versus CNS: odds ratio = 2.30, 95% CI 1.23-4.30; hematological versus non-CNS: odds ratio = 0.32, 95% CI 0.13-0.79).

Conclusions: Although most young adult childhood cancer survivors had no SADP during follow-up, 9.7% experienced moderate or high numbers of SADP days/year throughout the 15-year follow-up; compared to 2.7% among references. CNS tumor survivors were at particular risk of SADP long-term and need extra attention in their future work prospect.

Fig 1

Estimated trajectories of annual mean sickness absence (SA) and disability pension (DP) days among childhood cancer survivors with 15 (A), 10 (B), or 5 (C) years of complete follow-up. Note: For each trajectory, the solid lines represent the predicted trajectory, and the broken lines represent the 95% confidence intervals. The legend indicates the number and percentage of the cohort belonging to each trajectory.