Análise dos aspectos psicofisiológicos do estresse crônico laboral, percebido em trabalhadores do setor administrativo e de produção em uma indústria de calçados da Paraíba/Brasil

Abstract

It is known that stress is capable of producing several health problems in people and various aspects that way contribute to work in modulation and expression of signs and symptoms related to stress. However, there are few studies that deal with these relations in brazilian workers. So this thesis aimed to investigate the possible expression of the chronic work stress through physiological (muscle tenderness and awekening salivary cortisol levels) and subjective (pain, location and number of painful body parts, fatigue, work stress and perceived) and its relationships with sexes, work sectors and trait anxiety levels in 46 workers, who worked in a footwear industry of Paraíba, Brazil. This cross-sectional and exploratory study researched the following physiological parameters: plasma cortisol levels by ELISA, the measurement of muscle tenderness by an analogic algometer, for assessment of subjective variables were used: the inventory of state-trait anxiety (STAI), the questionnaire fatigue Yoshitake, the scale of job stress, the visual analogue scale (VAS) for perceived stress, the diagram Corlett and Bishop. Data were analyzed by means of test Kolgomorov-Smirnov, Shapiro-Wilks test, Student t test and / or Mann Whitney U test, Pearson correlation test and / or Spearman and Fisher's exact test. For all tests, was considered the significance level of < 0.05%. The results showed that people who had high trait anxiety showed a higher perception of fatigue, increased muscle tendemess and a greater number of segments painful compared to subjects who had low trait anxiety. It was also found several positive correlations between the variables investigated by gender, sector of work and level of anxiety among workers. There were on significant associations or correlations between awakening cortisol levels with outhers investigated variables, possibly because of size sample. In the study was possible to consider that trait anxiety, through the signs and symptoms investigated seems to contribute to the genesis of non-specific stress symptoms in this workers sample. So it's important that trait anxiety being considered in other research related to work stress, especially towards devolopment of programs to evaluation, treatment, rehabilitation and prevention of the deleterious effects of chronic work stress in Brazilian population.