Did you sleep well last night? Well if you didn’t Scientists are urging you to have a regular sleeping patten to stay away from Cancer.
This is definitely news that many would be talking about for some time. A new study has found that poor sleeping patterns are linked to cancer.
The study published in Current Biology adds to concerns about the impact of shift work on health. The researchers said women with a family risk of breast cancer should avoid work shifts, adding that more studies were needed.
The researchers used mice for the study and found that animals were 20% heavier despite eating the same amount of food.
Studies in people have shown a higher risk of diseases such as breast cancer in shift workers and flight attendants.
The researchers remarked that the link is uncertain because the type of person who works shifts are likely to develop cancer due to factors such as social class, activity levels or the amount of vitamin D they get.
According to researchers, mice prone to developing breast cancer had their body clock delayed by 12 hours every week for a year. Normally the mice had tumours after 50 weeks – but with regular disruption to their sleeping patterns, the tumours appeared eight weeks earlier.
The report said: “This is the first study that unequivocally shows a link between chronic light-dark inversions and breast cancer development.”
“If you had a situation where a family is at risk for breast cancer, I would certainly advise those people not to work as a flight attendant or to do shift work,” one of the researchers, Gijsbetus van der Horst, from the Erasmus University Medical Centre, in the Netherlands, said.
Dr Michael Hastings, from the UK’s Medical Research Council, told the BBC: “I consider this study to give the definitive experimental proof, in mouse models, that circadian disruption can accelerate the development of breast cancer.
The general public health message coming out of my area of work is shift work, particularly rotational shift work is a stress and therefore it has consequences. There are things people should be looking out for – pay more attention to your body weight, pay more attention to inspecting breasts, and employers should offer more in-work health checks.”
