Another Boon for Wellness Benefits: Revealing Employees’ Unanticipated Disease Risks

Employers — and employees — may find wellness benefits an even more welcome offering, a recent study suggests. A Quest Diagnostics study found that more than 1 out of 3 employees who took employer-sponsored lab-based wellness tests were unaware they were at high risk for a serious medical condition.

The study, Value of Laboratory Tests in Employer-Sponsored Health Risk Assessments for Newly Identifying Health Conditions; looks at the use of employer-sponsored lab testing to reveal new participants’ high cholesterol, diabetes and kidney disease, based on a research article on the study by the journal PLoS ONE. These three medical conditions were selected because of their high prevalence and the ability to treat them with early detection. 

The study found that 89.1 percent of participants with self-reported or laboratory evidence of chronic kidney disease were unaware of their condition. The study found that 28.4 percent of participants with evidence of diabetes did not know they have it, and 59.3 percent with evidence of high cholesterol had been unaware of it.

Younger participants had a lower rate of a newly identified disease risk than older participants. The study found nearly 25 percent of employees age 20 to 29 were shown to have an unanticipated disease risk, whereas 41.7 percent of employees age 50 to 60 did. However, younger participants were less likely to be aware of evidence of high cholesterol or diabetes. Also, more than 3 out of 5 in that age group with kidney disease were newly identified.

Men were more likely than women overall to have at least one unanticipated disease risk — 39.4 percent as opposed to 33.1 percent. However, males age 50 and above were less likely than than women that age to have a newly identified disease risk.

Participants were both male and female, members of various races and ranged from 20 to 64 years of age. Employees age 65 years and older were not included in the study because they comprised a small number of all employees. The average age of all participants was 42.3.