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 For older workers assigned to a simulated overnight shift, timing
sleep so they woke up closer to the beginning of their next shift
also led to better performance in work tasks, the study team reports
in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Shift work has people functioning at a time when their internal
systems promote sleep, the researchers write. This might affect
older adults more because they have reduced ability to sleep during
the day.
Past research has found that night workers tend go to sleep soon
after leaving work, and wake up many hours before their shifts
start, so they've been awake longer when work begins compared to a
typical day worker.
"We know the longer an individual is awake, the more sleep pressure
they build up," said senior author Dr. Jeanne Duffy of Brigham and
Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School.
"We wanted to test if placement of sleep closer to the next
night-shift would reduce sleepiness," Duffy told Reuters Health in
an email.
To see if behavior changes alone would make a difference in total
sleep and work performance, the authors recruited two groups of nine
adults each, ranging in age from mid-50s to early 60s. All
participants spent 8-hour simulated work shifts in a lab at Brigham
and Women's clinical research center but slept at home.
All the participants "worked" for four day-shifts from 7 a.m. to 3
p.m., got a day off, and then worked four night-shifts from 11 p.m.
to 7 a.m. During the shifts, researchers administered tests and
tasks to assess sleepiness, attention and performance.
Participants could go to bed when they wanted after day shifts.
After night shifts, one group was instructed to stay out of bed
until at least 1 p.m. then stay in bed for eight hours attempting to
sleep. The other group was only told to delay going to bed until 1
p.m.
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Based on sleep diaries and activity monitors, researchers found that
prior to the study and while working day shifts, both groups spent
roughly the same amount of time in bed and asleep: roughly 8 hours
and just short of 7 hours, respectively.
During night shifts, however, the group instructed to stay in bed
for 8 hours did so and got as much sleep as they had before, while
the group given no instructions spent less and less time each day in
bed while working night shifts.
For Duffy, an interesting result was that when participants were
instructed to sleep only in the afternoon and remain in bed for
eight hours, they were able to average two hours more sleep each day
than the comparison group.
The authors found that all the participants were prone to losing
focus on the night shift when compared to the day, but the group
that followed the sleep instructions performed somewhat better.
"The impact of night shift work on sleep deprivation, insomnia and
downstream cardiovascular and mental health outcomes is so profound
the American Association of Sleep Medicine has created the diagnosis
of Shift Work Sleep Disorder," said Dr. Amanda Hassinger of the
Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University
at Buffalo, New York, who wasn't involved in the study.
Years after retirement, people who suffer from this syndrome retain
poor sleep patterns linked to stroke, heart attacks, hypertension
and type-2 diabetes, Hassinger noted in an email.
"If we can find the essential aspects of sleep health that lead to
better overall health, we can design safer staffing models and
shifts that make night workers healthy, happy and optimize the
quality of their work," she added.
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2vdQeDP Occupational and Environmental
Medicine, online January 16, 2020.
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