Chronic health conditions, multimorbidity and subsequent economic inactivity in three British birth cohorts

Psychological distress in British birth cohorts is linked to later economic inactivity, with fully adjusted relative risks rising from 1.22 (95% CI 0.90–1.64) to 1.99 (95% CI 1.67–2.38) across cohorts.

• Why it matters: Economic inactivity due to ill-health is increasing in the UK, but how co-occurring chronic conditions affect later work absence is not well established.
• What they did: Using three UK birth cohorts (born 1946, 1958, 1970), researchers measured psychological distress, chronic back pain, and cardiometabolic disease in participants’ thirties and forties, then modeled later inactivity with modified Poisson regression and interaction tests.
• The result: Each condition was associated with higher later economic inactivity, multimorbidity showed increasing risk, and there was little evidence that comorbidity exceeded the sum of individual conditions on multiplicative or additive scales.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.