Cohort study reveals improved survival in gastric cancer survivors who return to work, indicating the prognostic value of employment reintegration.
Key Points
To identify determinants of return to work among workers diagnosed with gastric cancer and evaluate the association between returning to work and long-term overall survival.
Retrospective nationwide population-based cohort study linking national databases in Taiwan.
Included 4,467 workers newly diagnosed with gastric cancer between 2004 and 2015, followed for up to 11 years.
Predictors of return to work at 2 and 5 years were evaluated using Cox regression, and survival outcomes were assessed via Kaplan–Meier analysis.
Older age, male sex, comorbidities, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and manual labor correlated with lower return-to-work rates, whereas surgery and early-stage disease increased likelihood.
Stage I gastric cancer showed significantly higher likelihood of return to work compared with advanced stages at year 2 (HR = 4.67, 95% CI: 2.99–7.31) and year 5 (HR = 7.44, 95% CI: 4.12–13.43).
Returning to work was associated with a significant reduction in all-cause mortality across all cancer stages (adjusted HR = 0.49, 95% CI: 0.38–0.65).