Occupational and Environmental Health Screening Cohort of Yangsan Korea (OEC-YK): 2012-2023

Our plain-English summary of Occupational and Environmental Health Screening Cohort of Yangsan Korea (OEC-YK): 2012-2023, by D. Kang, E.S. Lee, S.Y. Kim, et al (Annals of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2025).

The study

• Authors: D. Kang, E.S. Lee, S.Y. Kim, Y. Kim, Y.H. Lee, Y.J. Kim
• Journal: Annals of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
• Published: 2025;37:e32
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher · Free full text

Abstract

The Occupational and Environmental Health Screening Cohort of Yangsan Korea (OEC-YK) was established to monitor long-term health outcomes in workers and environmental high-risk citizens through systematic periodic health examinations. The cohort integrates 623,402 examination instances from 105,768 participants at Pusan National University Yangsan Hospital (2012-2023), encompassing general health checkups, occupational exposure surveillance, cancer screenings, and others including asbestos-related surveillance. Examination types included general health examination (32.4%), cancer screening (20.6%), special health examination (16.2%), night-shift work examination (16.0%), chronic disease screening (4.8%), pre-placement examinations (2.1%), and asbestos-related surveillance (3.6%). At baseline, 59.0% were male and 75.5% were aged between 20 and 59 years. Follow-up rates reached 35.0% at 1 year, 31.9% at 2 years, and 3.2% at 11 years. Notably, the inclusion of systematic asbestos examinations, combined with a national asbestos job exposure matrix, allows detailed study of long-latency occupational diseases. This large-scale longitudinal dataset supports exposure-disease linkage analysis, job-exposure integration, and time-series modeling of worker health trajectories in Korea.

In plain English

This article was a cohort profile describing a health-screening database. The authors assembled records of 623,402 examinations of 105,768 people at Pusan National University Yangsan Hospital in Yangsan, Korea, from 2012 to 2023. These included general checkups, cancer screening, examinations of workers exposed to hazardous substances, night-shift worker examinations, and 22,568 asbestos-related disease screenings (3.6% of all examinations) for people with suspected occupational or environmental asbestos exposure, using chest X-rays, lung function tests and, selectively, high-resolution CT. At baseline, 59.0% of participants were male. Of the starting group, 35.0% returned for examination after one year and 3.2% after 11 years. The article reported no findings on asbestos-related disease. It restated earlier, separately published analyses linking night-shift work and noise with metabolic syndrome. The authors concluded the cohort can support exposure-response research and can be linked with job-exposure matrices. They noted it came from one hospital, lacked consistent quantitative exposure data, and may be affected by loss to follow-up.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Cohort profile describing a hospital-based retrospective, passive health-screening cohort
• Who was studied: 105,768 people who had 623,402 health examinations at Pusan National University Yangsan Hospital, Yangsan, Korea, from 2012 to 2023. They included workers, environmentally exposed citizens and general checkup examinees.
• Exposure: Multiple examination types. Asbestos-related disease screening under Korea's Asbestos Damage Relief Act was done for people with suspected occupational or environmental asbestos exposure. It used mainly chest radiographs and pulmonary function tests, with high-resolution chest CT used selectively, plus structured interviews on exposure history. Fiber types were not specified.
• Main results:
  • Asbestos-related disease screenings made up 22,568 of the 623,402 examinations (3.6%). No results of these screenings (such as disease rates) were reported.
  • Cancer screenings made up 128,315 examinations (20.6%). General health examinations were the largest category, at 32.4%.
  • At baseline, 59.0% of participants were male and 75.5% were aged 20 to 59.
  • Of the 105,768 people enrolled, 35.0% returned at 1 year, 31.9% at 2 years and 3.2% at 11 years.
  • Follow-up was 33,783 (31.9%) at year 2, 22,963 (21.7%) at year 3 and 14,408 (13.6%) at year 5.
  • Retention differed by age. Follow-up of those under 20 fell sharply after two years, while follow-up of those in their 40s and 50s stayed stable to 11 years.
  • Earlier, separately published analyses of this cohort (not new results of this article) linked night-shift work (HR 1.45; 95% CI 1.36–1.54) and noise exposure (HR 1.15; 95% CI 1.07–1.24) with higher metabolic syndrome risk.
• The authors' conclusion: The authors concluded that the cohort has the capacity to support detailed exposure-response investigations and occupational health risk assessment. They added that it can be linked with job-exposure and environmental exposure matrices.
• Limitations the authors state:
  • Data come from one tertiary regional hospital, which may limit generalizability.
  • Quantitative exposure data, such as cumulative exposure, are not consistently available, which limits exposure-response modeling.
  • Cancer screening outcomes may be incompletely captured because some participants were screened elsewhere.
  • Loss to follow-up from turnover, relocation or retirement may cause attrition bias.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Occupational Exposure, Latency, Occupational Disease.

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