Background: Stress-related disorders are common diagnoses for sickness absence (SA) and disability pension (DP) in many Western countries. Knowledge on future SA/DP trajectories among those starting such a SA spell is limited. The aims were to identify future SA/DP days trajectories among individuals starting an SA spell due to stress-related disorder and investigate socio-demographic and morbidity characteristics associated with specific trajectories.
Methods: Using microdata from nationwide registers, we established two cohorts of all living in Sweden who started a new SA spell >14 days due to stress-related disorder in 2011 (N = 32,417) or in 2018 (N = 65,511), respectively. Group-based trajectory models were used to identify trajectories of monthly average SA/DP days during the following 13 months, separate for each cohort. We used multinomial logistic regression to investigate the associations between sociodemographic and morbidity-related predictors and trajectory membership.
Results: We identified six SA/DP trajectories in the two cohorts: steep drop (30.6% and 35.9% of all included in 2018 and 2011); constant fluctuating (8.7%, 11.2%); fast decrease (25.5%, 24.4%); medium decrease (18.1%, 13.1%); slow decrease (10.8%, 7.3%), and constant high (6.2%, 8.0%). The distributions of sociodemographic factors, multi-morbidity, and history of SA/DP differed between the trajectory groups. For example, compared to the steep drop trajectory, individuals in the other trajectories were more likely to be a woman, older, having had prior SA/DP or specialized outpatient healthcare visits.
Conclusions: In these two explorative, population-wide cohorts, we identified six different trajectories of SA/DP days among all with a new SA spell with stress-related disorders. The trajectory groups differed regarding both sociodemographic and health-related covariates.
Copyright: © 2024 Gémes et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.