REAL LIFE NEWS: NIGHTSHIFT WORK IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH
by Hazed
While on the subject of sleep, a recent report shows that people working on the night shift have their bodies thrown “into chaos” which could cause long-term damage.
In the past, shift work has been linked to higher rates of diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart attacks and cancer, and now scientists have discovered just what damage it does at the deepest molecular level.
Disrupting the body’s natural clock, which is tuned to be active by day and to sleep at night, alters everything: body temperature, hormones, athletic ability, mood, brain function and more.
A study carried out by the Sleep Research Centre in Surrey, England, followed 22 people as their bodies were shifted from a normal day/night pattern to that followed by someone working a night shift.
Under normal sleep/wake cycles, 6% of our genes are precisely timed to be more or less active at specific times of the day, but once the volunteers switched to working at night, that genetic fine-tuning was lost and the body’s clock became chaotic.
“Over 97% of rhythmic genes become out of sync with mistimed sleep and this really explains why we feel so bad during jet lag, or if we have to work irregular shifts,” said Dr Simon Archer, one of the researchers.
That’s quite a worry for anyone who has to work at night.
