Shift Workers ‘Can't All Adjust to a Night Shift’
hubie writes:
Scientists at the University of Warwick, jointly with those at Universite Paris-Saclay, Inserm and Assistance Publique-Hopitaux de Paris (France), have challenged the widespread belief that shift workers adjust to the night shift, using data drawn from wearable tech.
By monitoring groups of French hospital workers working day or night shifts during their working and free time, the researchers have not only shown that night work significantly disrupts both their sleep quality and their circadian rhythms, but also that workers can experience such disruption even after years of night shift work.
Their findings, reported in a study in the Lancet group journal eBioMedicine, are the most detailed analysis of the sleep and circadian rhythm profiles of shift workers yet attempted, and the first to also monitor body temperature. This key circadian rhythm is driven by the brain pacemaker clock, and coordinates the peripheral clocks in all organs.
[...] Analysis by the University of Warwick statisticians of interruptions to sleep and rhythmic variations in core body temperature showed that night-shift workers had less than half the median regularity and quality of sleep of their day-shift colleagues. 48% of the night-shift workers had a disrupted circadian temperature rhythm.
[...] Importantly, even workers who had been on night shifts for many years still showed these negative effects on circadian and sleep health. The more years they had been on night work, the more severe the circadian disruption, contradicting widespread assumptions about adaptation to night work.
[...] Professor Barbel Finkenstadt from the University of Warwick Department of Statistics said: "There's still an assumption that if you do night work, you adjust at some stage. But you don't. We saw that most workers compensate in terms of quantity of sleep, but not in terms of quality during the work time."
Journal Reference:
Yiyuan Zhang, Emilie Cordina-Duverger, Sandra Komarzynski, et al., Digital circadian and sleep health in individual hospital shift workers: A cross sectional telemonitoring study [open], eBioMedicine, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.ebiom.2022.104121
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