RELATING SICK BUILDING SYMPTOMS TO ENVIRONMENTAL-CONDITIONS AND WORKER CHARACTERISTICS

Recent concern has centered on ''sick buildings'' in which there has b een an unusually high percentage of health complaints by the building' s occupants. Typically, these symptoms are thought to be tied to indoo r air quality characteristics, such as high levels of respirable parti cles or volatiles, thermal conditions, etc. In addition, recent studie s have drawn connections between ''sick building syndrome'' (SBS) symp toms and non-environmental variables, i.e., personal and occupational factors. This paper presents a brief review of a study by Hedge et al. (1995) and additional analyses of their data. In a study of 27 air-co nditioned office buildings, Hedge et al. measured nine indoor environm ental conditions at various locations within each building and concurr ently questioned workers on sixteen SBS symptoms and a number of other personal factors. The additional analyses presented in this paper att empt to draw formal statistical connections between SBS symptoms and b oth personal worker characteristics and indoor air pollutants simultan eously. The analyses were based on symptom severity response variables whic include information not only on the frequency with which an indi vidual experienced a symptom, but also on how much the symptom disrupt ed the individual's work. Results from sixteen linear mixed effects mo dels indicate that significant predictors are primarily personal and o ccupational in nature rather than environmental. For a number of the s ymptoms, additional variability attributable to buildings exists. Howe ver, any physical explanation of this variability remains unclear.