Assessment of cardiovascular load among hotel room cleaners

Duyen Dinh-Dang; Abdullah Khafagy; Niklas Krause; Carisa Harris-Adamson

doi:10.1016/j.apergo.2022.103886

Assessment of cardiovascular load among hotel room cleaners

Appl Ergon. 2023 Jan:106:103886. doi: 10.1016/j.apergo.2022.103886. Epub 2022 Sep 23.

Authors

Duyen Dinh-Dang¹, Abdullah Khafagy², Niklas Krause³, Carisa Harris-Adamson⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biological Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA.
² Department of Community Medicine and Pilgrims Health Care, College of Medicine, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia; Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
³ Department of Environmental Health Sciences and Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
⁴ Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; Department of Environmental Health Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA. Electronic address: carisa.harris-adamson@ucsf.edu.

PMID: 36162273
DOI: 10.1016/j.apergo.2022.103886

Abstract

Hotel room cleaners are a vulnerable population at risk for cardiovascular disease. To evaluate their workload heart rate (HR), % heart rate reserve (%HRR), blood pressure (BP), metabolic equivalent (MET), and energy expenditure (EE) were measured over two workdays and two off-workdays. The mean age was 45.5 (SD 8.2) years with a mean 10.4 (SD 7.8) years of work experience. Mean average and peak HR, %HRR, MET, and EE were significantly higher during a workday than an off-workday for the entire work shift, first and last hour of work. Mean average HR and %HRR saw the largest increase between the lunch and post-lunch interim. One-fourth of subjects exceeded the recommended 30% HRR threshold for 8-hour shifts. Some workers experienced a substantial increase in HR and DBP over a workday indicating physiologic fatigue and thus may be at increased risk for cardiovascular disease and premature death due to excessive physical work demands.

Keywords: Cardiovascular strain; Hotel room cleaners; Work demands.

MeSH terms

Blood Pressure / physiology
Cardiovascular Diseases* / etiology
Energy Metabolism
Heart Rate / physiology
Humans
Middle Aged
Workload

Grants and funding

T42 OH008429/OH/NIOSH CDC HHS/United States