REAL LIFE NEWS: SHIFT WORK DAMAGES YOUR BRAIN
by Hazed
It’s been known for a while that working antisocial hours is bad for your health, but now it seems like it dulls your intellectual ability too.
Scientists from the University of Swansea, Wales and the University of Toulouse, France have tested three thousand people, giving them memory tests, tests of their speed of thought and their wider cognitive ability. While the results showed, as expected, that the brain declines with age, they also showed that those who had worked more than ten years of shift work got the same results as non-shift-workers who were six and a half years older.
The good news is that those who had stopped doing shift work didn’t show this difference – it seems the brain does recover, but it takes time to do so.
Dr Philip Tucker, part of the research team in Swansea, told the BBC: “It was quite a substantial decline in brain function, it is likely that when people trying to undertake complex cognitive tasks then they might make more mistakes and slip-ups, maybe one in 100 makes a mistake with a very large consequence, but it’s hard to say how big a difference it would make in day-to-day life.”
