Working the night shift may augment a person’s risk for Obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, warns a new research.Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital have claimed that working odd hours can make people fat and increase their risk for high blood pressure, diabetes and hear disease.
The researchers’ team has found that night shift works affect much of the human body's biological clock, its circadian rhythm, resulting in increased risks from obesity, diabetes and even heart disease. The internal biological clock keeps day-shift time even when a person goes on the night shift, the team explains.
These findings, which appeared in an online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could explain why night-shift workers often have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and other health problems.
"In the long run, the physiological impact of shift work on several markers involved in the regulation of body weight -- leptin, insulin
define, cortisol -- seems to contribute to the increased risk for development of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity," said lead researcher Frank Scheer, a neuroscientist in BWH’s Division of Sleep Medicine, associate director of the Medical Chronobiology Program at BWH, a Harvard Medical School instructor in medicine.
To reach their findings, Scheer and colleagues studied 10 healthy volunteers in a sleep lab, where they ate and slept on a 28-hour schedule for ten "days". During their stay at the laboratory, the participants ate four identical-calorie meals.
The researchers found that when they shifted volunteers’ sleep-wake cycles to resemble those of night-shift workers, the participants experienced changes in their stress and hormonesdefine that control appetite. During this phase-when they were sleeping during the day and up at night- the volunteers’ bodies got seriously out of rhythm.
The disrupted patterns also caused three out of eight patients with no history of diabetes to show signs similar to those seen in people with diabetes or prediabetes. These participants showed spike in their blood sugar levels and insulin resistance similar to people who are more susceptible to developing the condition.
“There is convincing evidence for an increased risk of cardiovascular and metabolic complications associated with shift work, but the underlying mechanisms were largely unknown,” said Scheer. “We studied the influence of circadian misalignment, typical of shift work, on physiological pathways involved in glucose metabolism, the regulation of body weight, and cardiovascular function as a possible mechanism.”
Circadian misalignment refers to the body's own natural biological clock which resides within the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamic brain and regulates when we want to sleep, eat and wake.
An estimated 16 percent of the working population in the United States is involved in rotational shift work, and a significant number of people are affected by related sleep-wake disorders.
“These findings do not apply only to those performing shift work, but may also have implications for people suffering from circadian rhythm sleep disorders, including advanced and delayed sleep phase syndrome and many blind people experiencing circadian misalignment due to the absence of resetting their body clock by light,” said Scheer. “In addition, because these changes were observed within just a few days of misalignment, circadian misalignment may even temporarily affect millions of international travelers each year.”
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