Arthritis causing billions of working days to be lost in USA, says first research of its kind

The first study of its kind has found that workers in America from age 50 who have arthritis will be healthy and in work for around five and a half years less than their peers without the condition. 

Researchers at Keele University have previously explored the issue of Healthy Working Life Expectancy (HWLE) among the UK workforce, specifically how many years people can expect to keep working and still remain healthy, and have found that it is not keeping pace with rising life expectancy or increasing state pension age. 

They have now conducted a similar study looking at workers in the USA, as HWLE has never been estimated there, with their analysis showing that people with arthritis have a significantly lower HWLE than those without. Their findings are published in the journal ACR Open Rheumatology. 

The researchers estimate that having arthritis shortens someone's healthy working life by five and a half years on average, and their data shows that people with arthritis are healthy and in work for approximately 1400 fewer days than people without arthritis.  

Across the United States approximately 20 million people aged between 50 and 64 have arthritis, which suggests around 28 billion working days are lost across this age range. 

Other factors were found to also impact how long people with arthritis could stay healthy while working, such as having secondary conditions like obesity. The amount of time people were healthy and in work also differed between men and women, ethnicity and where people lived.  

This variation suggests that different approaches could help to tackle this problem among different groups, such as exploring factors in different workplaces that might make the issue worse, or alternative employment opportunities to help people keep healthy and working for longer. 

Professor Ross Wilkie, Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology and lead author of the study, said: “Maintaining and increasing health and work for the large number of people aged between 50 and 64 years old with arthritis will have huge benefits for people and the economy in the United States. People with arthritis can be healthy and in work, however this study highlights the size of the difference between those with arthritis and those that don’t. 

“The estimates become a target for approaches to improve health and work for adults aged 50 to 64; what can we do to increase the number of years that people are healthy and in work and this can involve government approaches. The higher the healthy working life expectancy the better population health; interventions to increase this will benefit both individuals and the economy.”