Incidence and influencing factors of occupational pneumoconiosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Objectives: To determine the incidence of pneumoconiosis worldwide and its influencing factors.
Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis.
Setting: Cohort studies on occupational pneumoconiosis.
Participants: PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and Web of Science were searched until November 2021. Studies were selected for meta-analysis if they involved at least one variable investigated as an influencing factor for the incidence of pneumoconiosis and reported either the parameters and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of the risk fit to the data, or sufficient information to allow for the calculation of those values.
Primary outcome measures: The pooled incidence of pneumoconiosis and risk ratio (RR) and 95% CIs of influencing factors.
Results: Our meta-analysis included 19 studies with a total of 335,424 participants, of whom 29,972 developed pneumoconiosis. The pooled incidence of pneumoconiosis was 0.093 (95% CI: 0.085~0.135). We identified the following influencing factors: (1..., Two reviewers independently conducted data extraction and any disagreements about data extraction were resolved through a full discussion with a third reviewer. The following information was extracted: (1) study characteristics: first author name, publication year, country, duration of follow‐up, sample size; (2) type of pneumoconiosis included; (3) participant numbers (separating those who developed pneumoconiosis and those who did not); (4) characteristics of these groups (such as gender); (5) exposure of interest (duration or dust concentrations); (6)information about the outcome of interest (incidence of pneumoconiosis); (7) risk estimates with 95% CIs from any statistic model.,