Characteristics of health status and lifestyle of workers in small and medium-scale Japanese enterprises

Introduction
In Japan, enterprises are legally required to provide workers with a periodic health check-up and health advice from doctors or nurses. However, the frequency of abnormal findings at small and medium-scale enterprises has recently been increasing. In other words, worse lifestyle choices, such as higher prevalences of smoking, alcohol intake and stress have been reported. The present study investigated the characteristics of health status and lifestyle choices of workers in Japanese enterprises.

Methods
A cross sectional analysis was performed. The subjects were 767 workers who underwent a health check-up and self-reported questionnaire survey in Uguisudani Medical Center, which is a specialized agency providing annual health check-ups for 170,000 workers at small and medium-scale enterprises in Tokyo, Japan. The health check-up items and criteria include waist circumference (male ≥85 cm and female ≥90 cm), systolic or diastolic blood pressure ≥130/85 mmHg, triglyceride ≥150mg/dl or HDL cholesterol<40mg/dl, and fasting blood glucose ≥110mg/dl. The lifestyle issues include smoking and alcohol intake status. IBM SPSS Statistics19 was used to perform all statistical analyses.

Results
The subjects consisted of 620 (80.8%) males and 147 (19.2%) females. The frequencies of abnormalities were excessive waist circumference in 33.6%, high blood pressure in 30.9%, dyslipidemia in 22.8% and insulin resistance in 14.2%. Smoking prevalence was 49.8% for males, and 12.2% for females. Frequency of people who reported drinking alcohol every day was 28.5% for males and 7.5% for females. Compared with non-smokers, a higher percentage of smokers showed decreased HDL (OR: 3.32, 95%CI: 1.45-7.59) after adjusting for gender and age.

Discussion
These findings suggest that workers had a higher frequency of abnormal health check-up items and increased prevalences of smoking and alcohol intake. Therefore, improvement in heath and lifestyle choices of workers remains an important task in workplace health promotion.