Washington, May 23: Watch out night shift staff!
Staying awake for work whole night can take a toll on your health as a new research published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says it can disrupt levels and time of day patterns of more than 100 proteins in the blood.
Such proteins can influence blood sugar, energy metabolism, and immune function, according to the study.
The findings could open the door for developing new treatments for night shift workers, who make up about 20 per cent of the global workforce and are at higher risk for diabetes and cancer and also enable doctors to precisely time administration of drugs, vaccines and diagnostic tests around the circadian clock.
“This tells us that when we experience things like jet lag or a couple of nights of shift work, we very rapidly alter our normal physiology in a way that if sustained can be detrimental to our health,” said the paper’s senior author Kenneth Wright, director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at University of Colorado Boulder.
The study is the first to examine how protein levels in human blood, also known as the plasma proteome, vary over a 24-hour period and how altered sleep and meal timing affects them, Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.
