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  • Date :
  • 6/2/2014

Working night shift can cause body chaos

night work body damage

A new study conducted by the British researchers indicates that working night shift is strongly associated with body long-term damage and chaos.

The researchers at the Sleep Research Centre in Surrey found that being awake causes a high scale, speed and severity of damage in body.

They followed 22 people as their body was shifted from a normal pattern to that of a night-shift worker.

The body analysis of participants uncovered a link between the night shift work and higher rates of type 2 diabetes, heart attacks and cancer, according to the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The night work disrupts the human body’s natural clock that has its own rhythm, tuned to sleep at night and be active during the day.

"Blood tests indicated that normally 6% of genes with the instructions contained in DNA were precisely timed to be more or less active at specific times of the day."

The recent study demonstrated that the genetic fine-tuning was damaged in the volunteers who were working through the night.

"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 one of the researchers at the University of Surrey, Dr Simon Archer.

“Every tissue in the body had its own daily rhythm, but with shifts that was lost with the heart running to a different time to the kidneys running to a different time to the brain,”‌ explained the fellow researcher Prof Derk-Jan Dijk.

Negative side effects often show up after several years of shift work. These changes in rhythmic patterns of gene expression are likely to be related to some of those long-term health consequences, he elaborated.

An earlier study carried out by the Danish Cancer Society also unraveled that night shift woman workers were threatened by a 40 percent higher risk of breast cancer compared with peers who worked days.

Source: presstv.com

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