Lifetime occupational history and risk of endometriosis

Jennifer L Marino, Victoria L Holt, Chu Chen, Scott Davis
Scandinavian journal of work, environment & health · 2009 · vol. 35(3) , pp. 233–240 · doi:10.5271/sjweh.1317 · PMID:19377833 · PMC2923470 · W1972976283
article OA: hybrid CC0 ⤵ 19 in-corpus citations
📄 Open PDF View on OpenAlex View on PubMed View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

This case-control study found that working as a flight attendant, service station attendant, or health worker, especially as a nurse, was associated with an increased risk of endometriosis.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

This exploratory population-based case-control study investigated whether lifetime occupational history is associated with surgically confirmed endometriosis, using interviews of reproductive-aged women first diagnosed between 1996 and 2001 and randomly selected reproductive-aged controls from the same health-maintenance organization. Each job was coded with US Census occupation and industry classifications, and unconditional logistic regression compared having worked in specific job categories versus never. Increased endometriosis risk was reported for women who had worked as flight attendants, service station attendants, or health workers, with the strongest association for flight attendants (OR 9.80, 95% CI 1.08–89.02) and particularly nurse/health-aide roles, while income and education did not change the occupational OR estimates. This paper centrally about endometriosis — it evaluates how lifetime occupational history categories relate to surgically confirmed endometriosis risk.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: Endometriosis is the presence of functioning endometrial glands and stroma outside the uterine cavity, most often in the pelvic peritoneal cavity. Women with endometriosis commonly have dysmenorrhea, dyspareunia, pain, menorrhagia, and/or metrorrhagia. Disease complications can include adhesions, chronic pain, and infertility. In this exploratory case-control study, we investigated the relationship between lifetime occupational history and surgically confirmed endometriosis in a population-based sample. METHODS: We conducted interviews with participants, all reproductive-aged female members of a large health-maintenance organization who were first diagnosed with surgically confirmed endometriosis between April 1, 1996 and March 31, 2001. Interviews were also conducted with randomly selected controls, reproductive-aged female enrollees of the same organization from the same time period. Each reported job was coded using US Census Occupations and Industries codes, and classified into categories. We used unconditional logistic regression to compare having worked in a given job class with never having done so. RESULTS: Our study found that an increased risk of endometriosis was associated with having worked as a flight attendant, service station attendant, or health worker, particularly as a nurse or health aide (flight attendant: odds ratio (OR) 9.80, 95% CI 1.08-89.02; service station attendant: OR 5.77, 95% CI 1.03-32.43; health worker: OR 1.49, 95% CI 1.03-2.15). Income and education did not make a difference in the OR estimates for the occupations examined. CONCLUSIONS: This exploratory study suggested that there might be an associated risk of endometriosis for those women who have worked as a flight attendant, service station attendant, or health worker, particularly a nurse.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Condition tags

endometriosisdysmenorrheadyspareuniainfertility

MeSH descriptors

Endometriosis Occupations Adolescent Adult Case-Control Studies Endometriosis Female Humans Interviews as Topic Logistic Models Middle Aged Odds Ratio Population Surveillance Risk Factors Women, Working Young Adult

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

References (21)

Cited by (19)

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-06-11T06:19:48.454388+00:00
openalex
last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
pubmed
last seen: 2026-05-13T22:14:11.755070+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK