Job-Exposure Matrices Addressing Lifestyle Factors

This issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine includes the description of a novel job-exposure matrix (JEM) designed to characterise job-specific differences in lifestyle risk factors developed by Bondo Petersen et al ,1 with the aim to provide lifestyle adjustment in aetiological analyses in Danish cancer registry-based studies. These lifestyle characteristics included smoking, leisure time physical activity, alcoholic beverage intake, body mass index (BMI) and fruit and vegetable consumption.These data-driven lifestyle JEMs were developed using pooled high-quality individual survey data collected over three decades on lifestyle characteristics from more than a quarter-million Danish workers. Only one similar set of lifestyle JEMs exist to my knowledge: in 2005, the Finish job-exposure matrix (FINJEM) added occupation and gender-specific JEM estimates for the time period 1995–1997 for similar lifestyle characteristics based on surveys on Finnish adult …