Health outcome · symptom
Sick building syndrome
Also: SBS, building-related symptoms
A cluster of symptoms — headache, fatigue, irritated eyes, nose and throat, dry skin, difficulty concentrating — that occupants experience in a particular building and that ease after leaving it, without a single identifiable disease.
Not reviewed by a clinician. This entry describes a disease or a symptom. We are introducing clinical review for pages of this kind; until that reviewer is in place, this page has been written and checked by the Coridum team but not reviewed by a clinician. It is general information and not medical advice. How this library is built is described in How we build this library.
Why it matters indoors
The term dates from the 1980s, when sealed, mechanically ventilated offices produced widespread complaints. It is a description, not a diagnosis: the symptoms are real and measurable in surveys, but their cause is usually a combination — low ventilation rates, volatile compounds from furnishings and cleaning, dry or humid air, dust, noise and lighting, and job stress. Studies consistently find fewer symptoms with higher outdoor-air supply and lower CO₂.
What helps
Increasing outdoor-air supply, controlling sources (materials, cleaning products, printers), maintaining humidity, and investigating dampness. Where a specific cause is found — mould, a chemical release, Legionella — the condition is instead called a building-related illness.
Indoor factors with evidence
12 of 29 Findings — those with the strongest study design.
| Factor | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | prevalence 54 | teachers and staff · classroom | study of enhanced filtration in school classrooms: indoor air quality measured together with a questionnaire on symptoms and satisfaction answered by the teachers and staff | F-1452 Xia Effectiveness of enhanced filtration interventions for impro… (2026) | machine |
| Carbon dioxide (CO₂) | OR 1.348 | occupants of educational buildings · educational building | cross-sectional study of occupants of educational buildings in Malaysia: indoor air quality measurements and sick building syndrome questionnaire, logistic regression | F-0288 Indoor air quality level influence sick building syndrome am… (2022) | machine |
| Formaldehyde (CH₂O) | OR 2.493 | occupants of educational buildings · educational building | cross-sectional study of occupants of educational buildings in Malaysia: indoor air quality measurements and sick building syndrome questionnaire, logistic regression | F-0289 Indoor air quality level influence sick building syndrome am… (2022) | machine |
| Particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀) | OR 1.958 | occupants of educational buildings · educational building | cross-sectional study of occupants of educational buildings in Malaysia: indoor air quality measurements and sick building syndrome questionnaire, logistic regression | F-0290 Indoor air quality level influence sick building syndrome am… (2022) | machine |
| Formaldehyde (CH₂O) | no effect size in the sentence; the same sentence reports butanol and 1,2-dichloroethane (no Vocabulary slugs) | residents of Dalian · home | cross-sectional study of residents of Dalian: diffusion-sampler measurements of formaldehyde and VOCs in bedrooms and kitchens with a sick building syndrome symptom questionnaire, GC/MS analysis | F-0333 Sick building syndrome by indoor air pollution in Dalian, Ch… (2013) | machine |
| Total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) | OR 1.06 (1.03–1.09) per 100 ppb | office employees · office | cross-sectional study of 417 employees in 87 offices in high-rise buildings in Taiwan: 8-hour indoor and outdoor CO2 and TVOC measurements with a sick building syndrome questionnaire, generalized estimating equations logistic regression | F-0385 Lu et al. Building-Related Symptoms among Office Employees Associated … (2015) | machine |
| Total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) | OR 1.02 (1.01–1.04) per 100 ppb | office employees · office | cross-sectional study of 417 employees in 87 offices in high-rise buildings in Taiwan: 8-hour indoor and outdoor CO2 and TVOC measurements with a sick building syndrome questionnaire, generalized estimating equations logistic regression | F-0386 Lu et al. Building-Related Symptoms among Office Employees Associated … (2015) | machine |
| Carbon dioxide (CO₂) | OR 1.17 per 100 ppm | office workers · office | cross-sectional analysis of the 100-building 1994-1998 USEPA BASE office dataset: workday time-averaged indoor minus outdoor CO2 (dCO2) against sick building syndrome symptoms, multivariate logistic regression adjusted for age, sex, smoking, carpet, thermal exposure and a marker of entrained automobile exhaust | F-0393 Indoor carbon dioxide concentrations and sick building syndr… (2002) | machine |
| Carbon dioxide (CO₂) | conclusion-level statement; the odds ratios per symptom and lecture hall are printed only in Table 4 (page 28) and are not taken | university students · air-conditioned lecture hall | cross-sectional study of five air-conditioned lecture halls with different occupant densities at a Sri Lankan university: CO2 and relative humidity logged at three positions during two-hour lectures, sick building syndrome questionnaire, ordinal logistic regression per lecture hall | F-0410 Associations of Indoor Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Symp… | machine |
| Carbon monoxide (CO) | a stated relation in the abstract without a number; the sentence names carbon monoxide together with formaldehyde, total volatile organic compounds and dust, and sibling rows carry the gender-stratified statements for formaldehyde and dust; the coefficients of the regression sit in the study's Table 9, which is not a sentence | office workers · office | cross-sectional study of 200 office workers in randomly selected nonindustrial buildings in the Klang Valley, Malaysia: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, total volatile organic compounds, dust as PM10, temperature, relative humidity and air movement measured in the workplace against indoor air symptoms from a modified MM040NA questionnaire, analysed with linear and logistic regression adjusted for smoking, chronic illness, age, gender, job category, new furniture, new partition and workstation | F-1210 Gender, airborne chemical monitoring, and physical work envi… (2013) | machine |
| Total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) | other 2.819 (0.234–5.404) | office workers · office | cross-sectional study of 200 office workers in randomly selected nonindustrial buildings in the Klang Valley, Malaysia: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, total volatile organic compounds, dust as PM10, temperature, relative humidity and air movement measured in the workplace against indoor air symptoms from a modified MM040NA questionnaire, analysed with linear and logistic regression adjusted for smoking, chronic illness, age, gender, job category, new furniture, new partition and workstation | F-1211 Gender, airborne chemical monitoring, and physical work envi… (2013) | machine |
| Total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) | other 0.364 (-11.004–10.275) | office workers · office | cross-sectional study of 200 office workers in randomly selected nonindustrial buildings in the Klang Valley, Malaysia: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, total volatile organic compounds, dust as PM10, temperature, relative humidity and air movement measured in the workplace against indoor air symptoms from a modified MM040NA questionnaire, analysed with linear and logistic regression adjusted for smoking, chronic illness, age, gender, job category, new furniture, new partition and workstation | F-1212 Gender, airborne chemical monitoring, and physical work envi… (2013) | machine |
Each row is one Finding — a sentence as printed in one study, recorded with its page in the Coridum Knowledge Base. Follow the Finding number for the exact wording and the citation. Checked says who verified the row: machine means every automatic check passed and the surrounding text was read; person means someone read the sentence in the document. Rows are re-checked by a person over time. The studies are curated in the Coridum Knowledge Base; the reading of them together is a Claim, shown separately.
Identifiers
- MeSH
- D018877
In the literature
- Mansor Indoor air quality and sick building syndrome symptoms in administrative office at public university (2024). Dialogues in health. doi:10.1016/j.dialog.2024.100178 CKB 0087
- Valley Evaluating the role of indoor environmental quality in predicting ocular and general sick building syndrome: insights from the AIRMED project (2026). doi:10.7717/peerj.21489 CKB 1060
- Sick building syndrome as a result of poor indoor air quality in educational and residential buildings (2021). Zeszyty Naukowe Politechniki Częstochowskiej. Budownictwo. doi:10.17512/znb.2021.1.19 CKB 0046
Studies in the Coridum Knowledge Base in which this term is used. The definition follows standard usage in WHO, ISO and textbook sources; it is not quoted from these papers.
CKB = document number in the Coridum Knowledge Base, our curated library of peer-reviewed studies. Follow the DOI for the original paper.
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Sick building syndrome. Coridum Knowledge G-0054, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0054/