Working night shifts for just a couple of days is enough to have serious impacts on our health, a new study has warned.
Numerous studies have highlighted the impact of shift work on human health, with effects on our heart, fertility and certain types of cancer. Now, research from Washington State University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has found that night shifts may also throw off the natural rhythms that regulate our blood sugar, metabolism and inflammation, increasing our risk of various metabolic disorders.
"There are processes tied to the master biological clock in our brain that are saying that day is day and night is night and other processes that follow rhythms set elsewhere in the body that say night is day and day is night," senior study author Hans Van Dongen, a professor in the WSU Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, said in a statement.
"When internal rhythms are dysregulated, you have this enduring stress in your system that we believe has long-term health consequences."
The study, published in the Journal of Proteome Research, subjected a group of volunteers to three days of night or day shift schedules. At the end of the three days, participants were kept awake for 24 hours under constant conditions to measure their internal biological rhythms without interference from their environment.
During this 24-hour period, blood samples were drawn at regular intervals to monitor changes in protein levels.
While some protein levels remained constant between both day and night shift workers, others showed significantly different 24-hour cycles in the night shift workers.
In particular, the researchers observed a near complete reversal of proteins involved in blood sugar regulation in the night shift participants. They also found that processes involved in insulin production and sensitivity, which usually work together to maintain healthy blood sugar levels, had become out of sync in night shift workers.
"What we showed is that we can really see a difference in molecular patterns between volunteers with normal schedules and those with schedules that are misaligned with their biological clock," Jason McDermott, a computational scientist with PNNL's Biological Sciences Division, said in a statement. "The effects of this misalignment had not yet been characterized at this molecular level and in this controlled manner before."
The researchers added that this discovery may provide new clues as to why night shift workers tend to be more prone to metabolic disorders.
"Overall, our results suggest that circadian misalignment is associated with a tug of war between central clock mechanisms controlling insulin secretion and peripheral clock mechanisms regulating insulin sensitivity, which may lead to adverse long-term outcomes such as diabetes and obesity," the researchers write.
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Pandora Dewan is a Senior Science Reporter at Newsweek based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on science, health ... Read more
