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| Night shifts may boost type 2 diabetes risk. – Copyright: Jason Stitt |
DIABETES DIGEST – Jan. 29, 2015 – Black women who work nights may have a greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to their counterparts who have never worked nights, a new study shows.
The study by researchers at Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University involved 28,041 women participating in the Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS)
, which is an ongoing population study that has been following 59,000 women over 8 years from 2005 to 2013. Among the 34,997 women who provided enough information to be included in the nightshift subgroup, they excluded those who had diabetes, and cancer, or had a heart attack or heart bypass surgery before the start of the study.
, which is an ongoing population study that has been following 59,000 women over 8 years from 2005 to 2013. Among the 34,997 women who provided enough information to be included in the nightshift subgroup, they excluded those who had diabetes, and cancer, or had a heart attack or heart bypass surgery before the start of the study.
Of the 28,041 women included in the study, 21 percent had worked the night shift for 1 to 2 years, 11 percent had worked the night shift for 3 to 9 years and 5 percent had worked the night shift for 10 or more years. Over eight years of follow-up, nearly 1,800 cases of diabetes were diagnosed among the women.
After adjusting for weight, smoking and other lifestyle variables the researchers found that working night shifts for 10 or more years relative to never working the night shift was associated with a 39 percent higher risk of diabetes among women aged 50 or younger compared with just 17 percent higher risk in older women aged 50 years or older. The link between night shift and diabetes was stronger in younger women than in older women.
The researchers suggest that the biological link may be due to disruption in sleep. "Shift work is associated with disrupted circadian rhythms and reduced total duration of sleep. Similar to the effects of jet lag, which are short-term, shift workers experience fatigue, sleepiness during scheduled awake periods and poor sleep during scheduled sleep periods. These alterations in the normal sleep-wake cycle have profound effects on metabolism," the study authors wrote.
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