• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.342-347
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• 2011

Healthy worker effect (HWE) refers to the consistent tendency for actively employed individuals to have a more favorable mortality experience than the population at large. Although HWE has been well known since the 1970s, only a few studies in occupational epidemiology have attempted to fully define and evaluate HWE. HWE can be separated into effects on the initial hiring into the workforce (healthy worker hire effect) and those on continuing employment (healthy worker survival effect). In this review, we summarize the methods for minimizingor adjusting for the healthy worker effect available in occupational epidemiology. It is noteworthy that healthy worker survival effect appears complicated, considering that employment status plays simultaneous roles as a counfounding variable and intermediate variable, whereas healthy worker hire effect may be adjusted by incorporating health status at baseline into the statistical model. In addition, two retrospective cohort studies for workers in the semiconductor industry and Vietnam veterans in Korea, respectively, were introduced, and their results were explained in terms of healthy worker effect.

• Proceedings of the Korean Statistical Society Conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.197-201
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• 2002

The healthy worker effect is an important issue in occupational epidemiology. We proposed a new statistical method to test the relationship between exposure and time to death in the presence of the healthy worker effect. In this study, we considered the healthy worker hire effect to operate as a confounder and the healthy worker survival effect to operate as a confounder and an intermediate variable. The basic idea of the proposed method reflects the length bias-sampling caused by changing one's employment status. Simulation studies were also carried out to compare the proposed method with the Cox proportional hazards models. According to our simulation studies, both the proposed test and the test based on the Cox model having the change of the employment status as a time-dependent covariate seem to be satisfactory at an upper 5% significance level. The Cox models, however, are inadequate with the change, if any, of the employment status as time-independent covariate. The proposed test is superior in power to the test based on the Cox model including the time-dependent employment status.