Clinicians seeing asthma patients should be aware of this link to office exposures.
The table also shows crude and adjusted ORs of incident asthma in adults in relation to office exposures.
Office exposures have been linked to symptoms of sick building syndrome, but their relation to the development of asthma has not been studied previously.
It is not uncommon in clinical settings that patients themselves link their asthmatic symptoms to office exposures, such as paper dust and CCP.
We modeled transmission of infection from contaminated mail in two general environments: 1) the workplace of mail distribution centers and 2) home or office exposures.
Although the physical office environment has traditionally been considered safe, a few previous studies have linked some office exposures to symptoms of sick building syndrome, such as eye, nose, throat, and skin symptoms, cough, and fatigue.
Our study is the first one to address the role of office exposures, such as paper dust, CCP, and FPP, for development of adult-onset asthma in office workers.
We adjusted the relations between office exposures and incident asthma for a number of confounders in logistic regression analysis to eliminate these factors, such as educational level and smoking, as potential explanations for our results.
According to a systematic Medline search (http://gateway.uk.ovid.com/gwl.ovidweb), no previous study had addressed the effects of these office exposures on incident asthma, although asthma is a rather common chronic disease in working-age adults.
The office exposures that have been linked to these symptoms include carbonless copy paper (CCP) (Jaakkola and Jaakkola 1999; Morgan and Camp 1986; Skov et al. 1989) and fumes from photocopiers and printers (FPP) (Fisk et al. 1993; Jaakkola and Jaakkola 1999; Skov et al. 1989; Stenberg et al. 1993).
