Problem
You’re worried about your heath and you’re doing a lot of shift work.
Reality
That shift work may jeopardise your health and be linked to cancer, according to a study in Current Biology.
Method
Mice bred to develop tumours at fifty weeks (yeah, science can be freaky) had their sleep delayed by twelve hours a week for a straight year.
Results
Not only did the delayed-sleep mice develop tumours eight weeks earlier, they ended up about 20% heavier than the mice in the control group—despite being fed the same diet.
The Takeaway
Obviously, it’s tough to scale up from mice to people, but mice are frequently used before human studies or when studies on humans would be unethical. If you’re prone to some cancers—say, you have a family history or have taken a genetic test—you might want to skip the shift work though. And it doesn’t hurt to get your sleep under control anyway.
Flickr.
