Rheumatic effects of vibration at work

Occupational exposures to vibration come in many guises, and they are very common at a population level. It follows that an important minority of working-aged patients seen by medical services will have been exposed to this hazard of employment. Vibration can cause human health effects, which may manifest in the patients that rheumatologists see. In this chapter, we identify the health effects of relevance to them, and review their epidemiology, pathophysiology, clinical presentation, differential diagnosis and vocational and clinical management. On either side of this, we describe the nature and assessment of the hazard, the scale and common patterns of exposure to vibration in the community and the legal basis for controlling health risks, and we comment on the role of health surveillance in detecting early adverse effects and what can be done to prevent the rheumatic effects of vibration at work.