A Portrait of a long-haul truck driver… Descriptive data analysis of a large population of the U.S. truck drivers

Introduction
Recent publications estimate that truck drivers have a 10- to 15-year lower life expectancy than the average American male who lives to age 76. We looked into the demographic and anthropometric characteristics of the large population of the long-haul U.S. truck drivers to find what puts them at risk.

Methods
The cohort included all truck drivers of one large U.S. trucking company who underwent DOT physicals during the period from 2005 -2008 and whose data was gathered and stored using RoadReady data management system. The Road Ready DOT physicals’ data is gathered and stored via a Web-based Microsoft SQL server application. Statistical analysis of the demographic characteristics of the population as well as there responses on the DOT questionnaire were analyzed and compared to the U.S. labor force and general population.

Results
In this population of 65,766 drivers, there were 95.7% male drivers and 4.3% female drivers, ages 20-89, with the average age of 40.2 years. 52% of drivers were obese with the BMI>30. Estimated life-time prevalence of diabetes in this population was 26% as compared to the self-reported prevalence of diabetes of 6.9%. The prevalence of the self-reported sleep apnea was 0.4% which is much lower than the estimated prevalence for this population.

Discussion
This study may serve as a wake up call for truckers, trucking companies, healthcare providers, insurance industry, and public health professionals. Lack of guidance from public health officials and/or medical experts on general health conditions, such as diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, hypertension, etc. is creating challenges in the certification process, which is often filled by the tracking companies' internal policies and recommendations.