February 2, 2018 – Night Shift

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Anchor lead: Working nights may increase your risk of cancer, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Working nights has been associated with a range of deleterious health outcomes for some time now, with a new study adding cancer to the mix. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says the hormone melatonin gets out of whack, in addition to longer term issues.

Nelson: There are many other things that happen. Eating patterns become funny, a whole bunch of things that are disrupted in one’s life if you work at night. So they looked at 61 different studies from all over the world, 114,000 cancer cases, 3.9 million people, all of them women for this particular one, and they found 41% higher chance of skin cancer, 32% higher chance of breast cancer, 18% higher chance of digestive system cancer, for women who reported working night shifts.  :31

Nelson says since night work is likely here to stay, what’s really needed is an understanding of why its so disruptive so intervention may be possible. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.