Is compromised sleep related to the development of cancer? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If your sleep is chronically interrupted or too long or short in duration, you may be at increased risk for some types of cancer, research suggests. Sleep expert Charlene Gamaldo at Johns Hopkins says it’s unclear whether sleep quality puts someone at risk or makes a disease or condition worse.

Gamaldo: There's risk in a nursing study for breast cancer, there is risk in men who do long term shift work for prostate cancer. In Europe for some time they were considering potentially labeling shift work as a carcinogen. From the other standpoint we've also seen for instance if you have pain you're probably not going to sleep very well but it turns out that if you sleep poorly your ability to tolerate pain is lower, so that's where you can kind of see that interrelationship.          :31

Gamaldo says what is clear is that adults need 7-9 hours of sleep per night in general, and chronically falling short of that is a risk factor for a growing list of diseases and conditions. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.