Investigating the longer-term health consequences of work-related injuries among youth

PURPOSE: To investigate the longer-term health consequences of work injuries among youth aged 15-24 years using a population-based, longitudinal study (1991-2001) of merged health care and workers' compensation records. METHODS: A group-based modeling approach was used (1) to identify unique trajectories of health care use defined by general practitioner visits among the study sample stratified by gender, and (2) to determine the injury factors that predict a youth's membership in a trajectory, adjusted for sociodemographic factors. RESULTS: Four long-term trajectories of health care use were identified among young injured workers, for both males and females. Similar trajectories were observed among a comparison, noninjured sample but the magnitude of health care use was consistently higher among the injured worker cohort, especially for females (attributable to general practitioner [GP] visits for symptoms, signs and ill-defined diagnoses), and a notable "spike" in health care use occurred in the year immediately after a work injury for both males and females that was not observed in the comparison population during the matched year (attributable to GP visits for musculoskeletal and injury diagnoses). For males, the type of work injury mattered with an increased odds of belonging to the higher health care trajectories associated with a musculoskeletal injury (odds ratio [OR] = 1.57, 95% CI = .76, 3.23; and OR = 1.61, 95% CI 1.08, 2.41 for the postinjury trajectories), adjusted for age, occupation, socioeconomic status, and geographic location. CONCLUSION: Persistent use of health care services may represent a cumulative burden of morbidity over the life course as a result of a work-related injury in general among young women and as a result of musculoskeletal injuries in particular among males.