SWEJEM - a national resource for exposure assessment of occupational exposure in epidemiological studies

For decades, JEMs have been used to classify occupational exposures in large scale epidemiological studies, where the study participants were too many to be able to carry out individual exposure measurements, or where exposure backwards in time had to be assessed.

With a Job Exposure Matrix (JEM), one can assess the exposure of several different occupational exposures in a cohort or registry study, using only an occupational code and knowledge of the time period of the exposure.

SweJEM is a Swedish infrastructure that contains JEMs for chemicals, particles, metals, noise, vibrations, physical (ergonomic) strain, psychosocial working conditions, and low employment quality.

SweJEM was launched externally in autumn 2023, https://ki.se/imm/swejem and JEMs has since then been sent out to research groups around the country. In addition, the JEMs have formed the basis for regions and authorities´ risk assessment of the work environment.

Already during the development phase, it has followed exposure trends in over time in Sweden and have evaluated occupational exposures during pregnancy and health effects in the mother and child as well as occupational exposures in relation to our most common public diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer.

The first version of this unique national infrastructure now needs further development to become more detailed and more comprehensive than before. To achieve this, we need funds to collect new data from workplaces in Sweden.

New data increases the relevance of the infrastructure by adding new later years of exposure, as well as improving the exposure history going back in time.

In addition, we want to receive data from different types of employers, in order to e.g. be able to observe difference in exposure between large and small companies or for different demographic groups so that we can study differences in exposure patterns between men and women and between different age groups.

Right now, this is only covered in parts of SweJEM.

Finally, we also want to collect new occupational exposures such as UV-light, heat and cold in order to better cover the climate changes that affect the working environment.

The aim is to keep the relevance of the infrastructure so that research groups, occupational and environmental medicine clinics, regions, occupational health care and authorities around Sweden can have access to the best possible exposure classification.