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. 2024 Aug 30;14(1):20224.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-70909-2.

Lifetime employment trajectories and cancer

Stéphane Cullati  1   2 , Stefan Sieber  3 , Rainer Gabriel  4 , Matthias Studer  5 , Arnaud Chiolero  6   7   8 , Bernadette W A van der Linden  9
Affiliations

Lifetime employment trajectories and cancer

Stéphane Cullati et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Working life is associated with lifestyle, screening uptake, and occupational health risks that may explain differences in cancer onset. To better understand the association between working life and cancer risk, we need to account for the entire employment history. We investigated whether lifetime employment trajectories are associated with cancer risk. We used data from 6809 women and 5716 men, average age 70 years, from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe. Employment history from age 16 to 65 was collected retrospectively using a life calendar and trajectories were constructed using sequence analysis. Associations between employment trajectories and self-reported cancer were assessed using logistic regression. We identified eight employment trajectories for women and two for men. Among women, the risk of cancer was higher in the trajectories "Mainly full-time to home/family", "Full-time or home/family to part-time", "Mainly full-time", and "Other" compared with the "Mainly home/family" trajectory. Among men, the risk of cancer was lower in the "Mainly self-employment" trajectory compared with "Mainly full-time". We could show how employment trajectories were associated with cancer risk, underlining the potential of sequence analysis for life course epidemiology. More research is needed to understand these associations and determine if causal relationships exist.

Keywords: Cancer; Employment; Epidemiology; Life course; Sequence analysis; Social determinants of health.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flow chart of respondents’ inclusion.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Chronogram of the eight employment trajectories for women aged 16–65. Data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Average silhouette width of 0.34.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Chronogram of the two employment trajectories for men aged 16–65. Data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Average silhouette width of 0.70.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Update of

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