TY - JOUR
T1 - Cognitive impairments in former patients with work-related stress complaints – one year later
AU - Eskildsen, Anita
AU - Andersen, Lars Peter
AU - Pedersen, Anders Degn
AU - Andersen, Johan Hviid
PY - 2016/11/1
Y1 - 2016/11/1
N2 - Patients on sick leave due to work-related stress often present with cognitive impairments. The aim of this prospective cohort study was to examine the long-term consequences of prolonged work-related stress in terms of cognitive functioning one year after initial professional care seeking. We tested a group of patients with work-related stress with a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery at two occasions, one year apart. At both time points, we compared the performance of patients with healthy controls matched pairwise on sex, age and length of education. This paper presents the results from the one-year follow-up. When adjusting for practice effects, patients improved on measures of prospective memory and processing speed. However, patients continued to perform worse than controls on all tests, though only half of the comparisons reached statistical significance. The effect sizes of the differences between the two groups at one-year follow-up were small to medium. In conclusion, former patients with prolonged work-related stress improved, but they continued to perform worse than controls after one year. In the acute phase, the largest impairments were related to executive function and mental speed but at follow-up memory impairments also became apparent.
AB - Patients on sick leave due to work-related stress often present with cognitive impairments. The aim of this prospective cohort study was to examine the long-term consequences of prolonged work-related stress in terms of cognitive functioning one year after initial professional care seeking. We tested a group of patients with work-related stress with a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery at two occasions, one year apart. At both time points, we compared the performance of patients with healthy controls matched pairwise on sex, age and length of education. This paper presents the results from the one-year follow-up. When adjusting for practice effects, patients improved on measures of prospective memory and processing speed. However, patients continued to perform worse than controls on all tests, though only half of the comparisons reached statistical significance. The effect sizes of the differences between the two groups at one-year follow-up were small to medium. In conclusion, former patients with prolonged work-related stress improved, but they continued to perform worse than controls after one year. In the acute phase, the largest impairments were related to executive function and mental speed but at follow-up memory impairments also became apparent.
KW - Neuropsychological test
KW - cognitive deficits
KW - executive function
KW - follow-up
KW - memory
KW - occupational stress
KW - processing speed burnout
U2 - 10.1080/10253890.2016.1222370
DO - 10.1080/10253890.2016.1222370
M3 - Journal article
SN - 1025-3890
VL - 19
SP - 559
EP - 566
JO - Stress
JF - Stress
IS - 6
ER -