Incidence analysis of occupational respiratory diseases in Türkiye: a cross-sectional legal registry-based study from 2013 to 2023

Abstract

Attending to the scarcity of research on the burden of occupational respiratory diseases in Türkiye, in the present registry-based epidemiological study, we investigated the incidence of occupational respiratory diseases in the country. This study is based on statistical database on occupational diseases from the Social Insurance Institution. The data from 2013 to 2023 were obtained from the official website. The results revealed that the most common occupational diseases in Türkiye are related to the respiratory system (27%). Most occupational respiratory diseases were pneumoconiosis cases (86.8%). In males, the most common disease was pneumoconioses (88.6%), while, in females, it was occupational asthma (55.4%). The annual mean incidence rate of occupational respiratory diseases amounted to 10.6 instances per 1,000,000 in the working population; it was 14.6 and 1 per 1,000,000 in males and females, respectively. The annual mean incidence rate of all pneumoconioses amounted to 9.2 per 1,000,000, while the incidence of occupational asthma was 0.7 per 1,000,000. The highest level of the incidence rate of occupational respiratory diseases-20.13 per 1,000,000-was observed in 2019. The number of patients diagnosed with occupational respiratory diseases was lower than expected. Although occupational diseases are preventable, in order to be eliminated, they must first be considered a national health problem. Therefore, the national occupational disease burden needs to be thoroughly assessed.

Keywords: Epidemiology; Incidence rate; Occupational disease; Respiratory disease.

Fig. 1

The proportion of occupational respiratory diseases among all occupational diseases

Fig. 2

The incidence rates of all occupational respiratory diseases