RESEARCH ARTICLE Peptic Ulcer Disease in Healthcare Workers: A Nationwide Population-Based Cohort Study

Health care workers (HCWs) in Taiwan have heavy, stressful workloads, are on-call, and have rotating nightshifts, all of which might contribute to peptic ulcer disease (PUD). We wanted to evaluate the PUD risk in HCWs, which is not clear. Using Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database, we identified 50,226 physicians, 122,357 nurses, 20,677 pharmacists, and 25,059 other HCWs (dieticians, technicians, rehabilitation thera-pists, and social workers) as the study cohort, and randomly selected an identical number of non-HCW patients (i.e., general population) as the comparison cohort. Conditional logisti-cal regression analysis was used to compare the PUD risk between them. Subgroup analy-sis for physician specialties was also done. Nurses and other HCWs had a significantly higher PUD risk than did the general population (odds ratio [OR]: 1.477; 95 % confidenc