Exploring factors associated with inflammation in stressed workers: a cross-sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Chronic occupational stress leads to physical and mental illnesses, highlighting the importance of effective stress management in modern societies. Recently, chronic stress-induced systemic low-grade inflammation has garnered increasing attention for its stress response and crucial pathological role in the development of both physical and mental illnesses. In this context, elevated salivary interleukin-6 (sIL-6) levels have been developed as measurable and non-invasive stress indicators. However, the factors associated with sIL-6 in stressed office workers, including the symptomatic manifestations of stress responses, have not been extensively investigated. Since direct measurement of inflammation is costly in routine stress management, identifying symptoms that reliably reflect inflammation could facilitate the development of more effective, inflammation-based stress management strategies. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study, stressed office workers were recruited through a screening process using a Brief Job Stress Questionnaire. Saliva samples were collected to measure sIL-6 levels, and participants completed questionnaires addressing their occupational environment, symptomatic manifestations, and lifestyle. After excluding one participant owing to a medical history that could potentially affect sIL-6 levels, 128 stressed office workers were included in the analysis. RESULTS: Our model-based analysis for symptomatic manifestation demonstrated that elevated sIL-6 was significantly associated with greater feelings of fatigue as well as relatively higher vigor. A separate model-based analysis for stressors revealed a significant association with higher qualitative job overload. Data-driven analyses further supported the finding that elevated sIL-6 was significantly associated with fatigue. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that the feeling of fatigue may reflect chronic stress-induced systemic low-grade inflammation in the body, highlighting the importance of self-monitoring fatigue for early intervention. Inflammation-based stress management holds promise in preventing both mental and physical illnesses in stressed office workers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".