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Objectives. We explored a postulated association between daily driving time and knee pain.
Methods. We used data from the Taxi Drivers' Health Study to estimate 1-year prevalence of knee pain as assessed by the Nordic musculoskeletal questionnaire.
Results. Among 1242 drivers, the prevalence of knee pain, stratified by duration of daily driving (< or =6, >6 through 8, >8 through 10, and >10 hours), was 11%, 17%, 19%, and 22%, respectively. Compared with driving 6 or fewer hours per day, the odds ratio of knee pain prevalence for driving more than 6 hours per day was 2.52 (95% confidence interval = 1.36, 4.65) after we adjusted for socioeconomic, work-related, and personal factors in the multiple logistic regression.
Conclusions. The dose-related association between driving duration and knee pain raises concerns about work-related knee joint disorders among professional drivers. (Am J Public Health. 2004;94:575-581)
Knee pain is a common health problem worldwide. Data from the First National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES I) suggest that in the 1970s, it was the second most common musculoskeletal symptom, affecting 13.3% of people aged 25 to 74 years.1 Results of NHANES III (1988-1994) revealed that 18.1% of US men and 23.5% of US women aged 60 years or older suffered from significant knee pain.2 During the same period surveyed by NHANES III, the estimated 1-year prevalence of persistent knee pain in England was 25% among those aged 55 years and older.3 Similar statistics showing that knee pain is a prevailing public health problem can be derived from studies conducted in Europe.4-7 Other research findings demonstrate that people who live in the nonindustrialized world are not exempt from this endemic problem, because estimates of knee pain prevalence from nonindustrialized countries either were comparable to those in industrialized countries8-11 or were even higher,12 partially because of the greater prevalence of heavy physical activities in nonindustrialized countries.
Knee pain is very likely a health problem with tremendous health care costs, despite the lack of direct cost estimates. In 1996-1997, more than 6 million Americans sought medical care for knee problems,13 about 5 million of whom visited offices of orthopedic surgeons and 1.4 million of whom went to a hospital emergency room. A survey of US orthopedic surgeons conducted in 1997 found...