Shift work causes heart disease and cancer
Following this week’s news that a Scandinavian woman has been paid financial compensation after developing breast cancer following years of working night shifts, and with 20% of United Kingdom employees involved in shift work, we’re looking into the whole subject of shift rostering, staff rotas and their long-standing related link to increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and cancer.
Denmark is the first country to formally recognise the health risks of prolonged sleep deprivation due to shift work schedules, disturbed sleeping patterns, fatigue, and the eating problems caused by workers in many diverse industries having to work regular or interrupted shift work patterns. There have been approximately 40 successful claims related to work rosters to date.
Who is doing the research?
The research was carried out in 2007 and led by Dr Vincent Cogliano of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) – a French based United Nations organisation affiliated to the World Health Organisation. This organisation specialises in the study of cancer risks. The conclusions from their work that focussed on women such as nurses and air hostesses, showed that they face an elevated risk of breast cancer if they are involved in long term shift work and anti-social hours working arrangements.
The evidence was reinforced by animal studies showing that exposure to nocturnal light, or simulated jet lag substantially boosted the development of carcinogenic tumours.
Why does shift work cause health problems?
There is plenty of evidence going back many years that working during the night can cause a variety of health problems. There have been epidemiological studies – the study of factors affecting the health and illness of populations – conducted on people who suffer disruption of the normal body clock (or circadian rhythm) due to their working patterns.
The main factors influencing the development of these health issues are :-
- Sleep deprivation and sleep debt due to shift schedule
- Sleeping pattern disruption as a result of shiftwork
- Loss of synchronisation with natural light levels and light level transitions
- Eating and nutritional disorders associated with night work
- Exhaustion and fatigue, work related
- Number of years involved with shift pattern working
- Greater accident risk due to shift rota
The risk of night time working to human health has now been compared only marginally less than some well known carcinogens such as asbestos or chemical pollutants. A report published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, showed a 36% greater risk of breast cancer for women who had worked night shifts for more than 30 years, compared with women who had never worked nights.
The role of Melatonin in suppressing illness
Melatonin is a human hormone that is used to regulate the body’s internal clock. It has been shown to have beneficial effects in preventing the development of some types of cancer. It is believed that major alterations in sleep patterns in shift workers can suppress the production of melatonin in the body.
What you can do to reduce your risk
you don’t have to fall victim to this increasing occupational health risk. There are a number of short and longer term actions that you can pursue to reduce your risk of developing a dread disease such as heart disease or cancer, related to your current working pattern :-
- Talk to your employer about your health concerns – they may offer you an alternative working arrangement or shift pattern
- Ask your doctor’s advice about how to cope with the effects of shift working
- Have regular health checks especially if you have been working at night for many years
- Try to reduce the length of the night shift if possible – your employer may be able to offer more flexible rostering. 12 hour shift work is more problematic than an 8 hour shift
- Do not work nights for many years or decades as this increases the risk even further
- Consider planning to re-train, learn new skills, or applying for a different position within the company
What about shift work and Heart Disease?
Professor Andrew Watterson, an occupational health specialist based at Stirling University in Scotland, has recently been interviewed on the subject, and quoted “we [in the UK] are far behind Scandinavia in recognising the dangers [of shift working]. “I think we can say there is a big public health problem here,” he said. “The evidence has been good over a long period of time about cardiovascular disease and night work, gastro-intestinal problems and nights. “Work indicates there may be risks in terms of low birth-weight babies and longer pregnancies for women. “We don’t tend to identify the damage being done where shift working is prevalent and I think that’s an error. The damage is there but we don’t see it and we don’t count it.”
Longevity and Coronary Heart Disease
Claiming the full potential for your heart – the secret to longevity …
Wasted lives
Lives are being lost unnecessarily, worldwide, due to coronary heart disease. in 2007 this claimed the lives of more than one hundred and twenty thousand people in the United Kingdom. So what is the secret to longevity based on heart health?
There is no known anti-aging longevity serum, but we now have more medical and scientific knowledge about the human heart than at any time in our history. The sad fact is that few people bother to educate themselves about anti-aging, longevity, and how to care for their heart, and many treat their hearts with little care and respect. Some even treat their hearts with such extreme abuse that they die prematurely in their forties or early fifties.
The human heart is capable of lasting 120 years!
The latest longevity statistics research from the United States suggest that the heart was designed to last well past our 100th birthday – maybe even for one hundred and twenty years. This agrees with factual data obtained from studying the medical records for health and longevity from the countries which have the world’s oldest living people and the longest average life span.
The heart is an amazing machine – a miraculous collection of muscle, blood vessels and nerve tissue which has to beat continuously from the moment we are born, and for the rest of our lives. In a typical day our hearts will beat 100,000 times forcing life preserving oxygen-rich blood to the farthest corners of our bodies. This equates to 34 million beats per year. how many man-made machines can claim such a reliable performance?
We threaten our own health daily
Yet, we are constantly threatening the health and long term survival of this vital organ by our own lifestyles, behaviours and habits. We eat unhealthy diets, smoke cigarettes and tobacco, drink too much alcohol, expose ourselves to excessive stress and don’t take sufficient exercise.
International longevity risk – where do people live the longest lives?
Well, it’s a small, unassuming island off the coast of Japan – Okinawa. This is known as the world capital for super longevity, as this place has the greatest proportion of centenarians (people over the age of 100) in the entire world. Amazingly, in Okinawa, there are 35 people per 100,000 over a hundred years old. By comparison, the United Kingdom can only manage a paltry 10 people.
Why do these folks live such long lives?
There is no longevity pill, but the folks from Okinawa have a long life because they have a healthy lifestyle! This in turn produces a healthy heart. They tick all the right boxes for heart health based on :-
- A diet low in saturated fat
- High consumption of fresh vegetables, fruit and fish
- A stress-free, calm and serene lifestyle
- A daily fitness and exercise regimen
This combination in turn produces the heart healthy benefits of arteries free from disease, low blood cholesterol levels and lack of blood clotting plaque forming Atherosclerosis symptoms. There is also evidence to support the theory of calorie restriction longevity, where people who consume only 80 percent of their recommended daily calorie intake – known as ‘hara hachi bu’ – gain positive heart health benefits from this practice.
Heart health not genetic, but behavioural
Medical research into the lives of the people from Okinawa has concluded that their healthy lifestyle is responsible for an amazing 80 percent of their long lives. Only 20 percent of the long lived residents old age could be attributed to genetic factors, so there is no longevity-gene for these folks.
However, there is a disturbing prologue to the above success story – in more recent times, the increasing shift towards a more westernised diet and lifestyle has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the heart health of Okinawans under the age of 50 years – as this group unfortunately now has the highest rate of heart disease in the whole of Japan – proof if it were needed that nurture rather than nature is the principal and overriding factor related to heart health and survival into the centenarian category.
Why is there so much heart disease?
Deaths from heart disease and Stroke wipe out over four hundred thousand Americans, and one hundred and twenty thousand people in the United Kingdom each year! And yet we now know more about the physiology of the heart than ever before.
Why do we still have folks dying prematurely from heart attacks, strokes and blood clots at the ridiculously young age of forty, fifty or even sixty years of age? We have the knowledge and the technology to enable our hearts to keep on pumping blood round our bodies well into our senior years – even up to age ninety or one hundred years old.
The latest studies into the longevity and lifestyles of the oldest people in the world have confirmed that the human heart is perfectly capable of functioning for many more decades than the average age of death from heart related illness in the population would suggest.
Coronary heart disease has been a recognised disease for more than a century, and recent advances in scientific research have produced an enormous number of early diagnoses, drug treatments, natural remedies and surgical procedures that have prevented countless thousands of deaths. However, despite all this progress in the treatment of heart related problems, the incidence of death and diseases of the heart continue to surge relentlessly.
One of the problems is that coronary heart disease develops slowly within the body’s arteries over many years. Most people are uneducated about heart disease and so are unaware of the risk factors. They have received very little education or exposure about this killer disease, as they have grown older and passed through school, college and into adulthood.
Without a clear understanding of ALL the risk factors for heart disease it is impossible to plan on avoiding it. The science tells us that the heart risk factors that contribute to the development of many types of cardiac related problems are cumulative – in other words the more risk factors that you have the greater is the chance that you will develop a serious or life threatening heart condition.
The vitally important message here is that if you focus your heart disease prevention efforts on just one factor, this is not sufficent – you have to focus on all of them. This is often misunderstood by people who seek at all costs to reduce their dietary fat intake, whilst, for example, ignoring the fact that they are physically inactive, and do not take nearly enough aerobic exercise.
Here is a quick review of the major risk factors for developing heart disease :-
- Smoking
- High Blood Pressure
- High Blood Cholesterol
- Inactive Lifestyle
- Obesity
- Diabetes
- Excessive alcohol consumption
If you examine your lifestyle and make moderate improvements to reduce the above risk factors, this will reduce your overall risk more substantially than an extreme effort to reduce just one or two of the heart health risk factors.
Coronary Heart Disease Causes
Coronary heart disease definition (CHD)
A common question we receive is ‘what is coronary heart disease’? CHD may be summarised by what happens when your heart’s blood supply is blocked, or interrupted, by a build-up of fatty substances in the coronary arteries. These deposits can cause the walls of your arteries to become coated (or furred up), which is known as atherosclerosis. If your coronary arteries – the ones which feed the heart – are narrowed, then the blood supply to your heart will be restricted. This can cause pain in the chest, or angina.
If a coronary artery becomes completely blocked, it can cause a heart attack, or to quote the correct medical term – a myocardial infarction.
Coronary heart disease facts
It is important to consider that healthcare professionals are usually only involved when heart disease becomes evident, and sometimes this can be too late. So, overwhelmingly, prevention is better than cure. The following coronary heart disease statistics can be very sobering :-
- Heart disease affects nearly 1 million people in the United Kingdom
- Heart disease kills more than 110,000 people each year in the United Kingdom
- 40 percent of patients who die of a heart attack have no prior warning
- 50 percent of heart attack deaths occur in the first two hours following the attack
- Doctors and heart specialists typically see less than 5 percent of patients who die after a sudden heart attack
A relatively new illness?
Coronary heart disease has only been recognised as a major disease for about a hundred years. In the last few decades we have seen major scientific advances in its diagnosis and treatment through drugs and surgical procedures which has resulted in thousands of lives being saved.
However despite all this progress, worldwide heart disease statistics indicate that heart disease is still increasing dramatically.
Coronary heart disease develops in the arteries over a long period of time. However it is possible to personally influence whether this terrible dread disease will take a hold over your life or not.
Previous generations had much simpler lives
It is very obvious that our ancestors lead very different lives from us. In order to feed themselves, they had to use a lot of physical energy to hunt, or manually farm their food. The type of food they ate largely consisted of vegetables, fruit and nuts with some fish or meat if they had a lucky break on the previous hunting trip.
The way the food was cooked also differed – it would usually have been cooked in a hurry over an open fire, rather than refined and over-cooked, thus losing much nutritional value. But most importantly the pre-historic diet was extremely low in fat. We could refer to this as the perfect ‘anti’ coronary heart disease diet.
Compare that with the modern lifestyle – consumption of high quantities of highly refined processed foods that are also high in saturated fat, salt and sugar. Combined with sedentary or inactive lifestyles with insufficient physical activity and exercise - you have a recipe for illness and disease.
Excessive fat consumption puts a strain on the liver, which is responsible for maintaining the correct level of cholesterol within the body. The excessive fat consumption associated with the modern western diet causes the liver to ‘overflow’ it’s capacity to remove surplus ‘low density molecules’ which are high in ‘bad’ or ‘LDL’ cholesterol lipoproteins.
The human genome project has provided us with some incredible science regarding our genetic make-up. There is good scientific evidence that the human genetic footprint requires a diet and lifestyle that is closer to the pre-historic variety than the modern variety. So it makes sense that if we wish to avoid this disease then we need to return to a lifestyle and diet which is closer to our ancestors.
Symptoms of coronary heart disease
The symptoms of CHD may only begin to manifest themselves after many years or decades of physical neglect. this is why it is known as the silent killer. Most heart disease will remain hidden until it becomes a serious problem. the following symptoms indicate a well established heart problem which requires urgent medical action to prevent a major catastrophe in the sufferer’s life :-
- Chest pain, also called angina
- Shortness of breath when exercising or during another vigorous activity
A fast heartbeat - Weakness, dizziness, and feeling sick to your stomach (nausea)
- Increased sweating.
Importance of understanding the risk factors
In order to prevent CHD, we need to fully understand the causes, which involves looking at all the risk factors. There are many different reasons which cumulatively increase the risk of developing a heart condition. The major ones which are listed below are responsible for 90 percent of all first heart attacks :-
- smoking
- high blood pressure
- poor diet
- excess body fat
- insufficient exercise
- excess stress
It is never too late to reduce the chance of developing heart disease
Even after many years of neglecting our heart health, the health of the arteries can be improved by making some simple but major lifestyle changes. The most important of these are to adopt a healthy diet, take healthy exercise, lose excess weight, and quit smoking.