Early retirement from work among employees with a diagnosis of personality disorder compared to anxiety and depressive disorders

Abstract

<p><strong>Objective: </strong>Risk of retirement from work before statutory retirement age among employees with personality disorders is unknown.</p><p><strong>Method: </strong>We used diagnoses of awarded medical rehabilitations and hospitalisations to select two clinical cohorts from a population of 151,618 employees: participants in rehabilitation (total N=1942, 233 personality disorder, 419 anxiety disorder and 1290 depression cases) and hospitalised patients (N=1333, 354, 126 and 853, respectively). Early retirement from work was tracked through national registers during a period of 5 years. Cox proportional hazard models were used to examine the association of diagnostic groups with risk of early retirement.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>In models adjusted for age, sex and socioeconomic position, the relative risk of early retirement for patients with personality disorders was 3.5-fold (95% CI 2.1 to 5.8) in the rehabilitation cohort and 2.3-fold (95% CI 1.6 to 3.5) in the hospital cohort compared with anxiety disorders. The corresponding hazard ratios of early retirement for personality disorders compared with depressive disorders were 1.1 (95% CI 0.8-1.5) and 1.7 (95% CI 1.4-2.1), respectively.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>Personality disorders increase the risk of early retirement at least to an equal extent as depression and more than twice that of anxiety disorders.</p>