1998). Fewer studies use the effort–reward imbalance (ERI) model (Siegrist et al. 2004) or the organisational injustice model (Elovainio et al. 2006) or other instruments. There are different ways to derive PAFs for a population (e.g., country or region), either directly from a population-based study or indirectly. With the indirect

approach, risk estimates from one or more analytical studies are retrieved and combined with information on the fraction of exposed persons in the general population from other sources (mainly surveys). Risk estimates may be derived from studies selected based on specific quality criteria (e.g., a certain design and/or statistical model including the relevant confounders) or from meta-analyses, find more respectively. When using this method, survey questions to estimate the EVP4593 prevalence of exposure need to be comparable to the instruments

used for the exposure in the observational studies, which are the basis for the calculation of risk estimates. Validity of the PAF depends heavily on the estimation of the prevalence as well as risk estimates, given that they are correctly estimated (Olsen 1995). Niedhammer et al. (2013) used proxies for the job strain and effort–reward imbalance from the fourth European Working Condition Survey (EWCS) and combined the prevalences with risk estimates from published meta-analyses. With this indirect method, the authors describe PAFs between 2.51 and 5.77 % for NADPH-cytochrome-c2 reductase job strain and 9.78–27.89 % for

the effort–reward ratio >1 in the European countries. Reviewing the literature on fractions of CVD attributable to psychosocial work factors, we also saw that the estimated GW786034 ic50 PAFs differ severely between countries (Backé et al. 2013; Backé and Latza 2013). With the indirect approach, PAFs for cardiovascular outcomes attributed to occupational stress have been derived for the United States (Steenland et al. 2003), Finland (Nurminen and Karjalainen 2001), Korea (Ha et al. 2011), and France (Sultan-Taïeb et al. 2011). For Sweden, PAFs in relation to several diseases were calculated by Järvholm et al. (2013). Here, with respect to job strain and myocardial infarction, calculations with the direct approach were based on a population-based case reference study (Peter et al. 2002). Illustrated for those European countries, where information about PAFs (besides the calculations based on EWCS) are available, PAF estimates differ depending on different prevalence of the exposure but also on different choices in the selection of studies indicating the risk estimates (Table 1). Besides, also discussed by Niedhammer et al. (2013), some authors choose age- and gender-adjusted risk estimates, and some multiple-adjusted risk estimates, respectively. The latter may result in an underestimation of the relative risk when mediators such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol are included. In a recent meta-analysis (Kivimäki et al.