African American women who work night shifts are significantly more likely to develop diabetes than those who have never worked nights.
The cause may be sleep cycle disruptions, say the authors of a new study in the journal Diabetologia.
The researchers found that the risk of diabetes increased as women spent more years working night shifts.
Relative to never having worked nights, the increased risk of developing diabetes was 17 percent for one to two years of night shift work, 23 percent for three to nine years, and 42 percent for 10 or more years.
After adjusting for BMI (body mass index) and lifestyle factors, such as diet and smoking status, the association between increasing years of night shift work and diabetes risk remained statistically significant, with a 23 percent increase in those who had worked night shifts for 10 years or more, compared to those who never worked the night shift.
“Even though lifestyle factors and BMI explained a major part of the association of shift work with incident diabetes, women with a long duration of shift work had an increased risk of diabetes after control for those factors, suggesting the presence of additional causal pathways,” the authors write.
They note that shift work is associated with disrupted circadian rhythms and reduced duration of sleep.
Diabetes Risk
Some previous studies have investigated the link between night shift work and diabetes—among them, the Nurses’ Health Study of mostly white women and another study in Sweden. However, body mass index accounted for most of the association in previous studies.
With the increased prevalence of diabetes in black women in the United States—12.6 percent, compared to 4.5 percent among whites—the authors decided that this potential association should be explored among black women.
The researchers followed more than 28,000 women enrolled in the long-running Black Women’s Health Study who were free of diabetes in 2005 and provided information about their work routines. The women were followed for incident diabetes during the next eight years. Thirty-seven percent reported having worked the night shift, with five percent having worked that shift for at least 10 years. During the eight years of follow-up, there were 1,786 incident diabetes cases.
The study finds that when black women who reported ever working the night shift were compared to those who had never worked it, they had a 22 percent increased risk of developing diabetes. After adjusting for BMI and lifestyle factors, the increased risk was 12 percent.
The authors also found that the association was stronger in younger women than in older women. Working night shifts for 10 or more years relative to never working the night shift was associated with a 39 percent higher risk of diabetes among women younger than 50, compared with a 17 percent higher risk in women aged 50 years or older.
When quitting isn’t an option
“For most shift workers, simply quitting their jobs is not likely to be a feasible option for prevention,” says study leader Varsha Vimalananda, a researcher with the Center for Health Organization and Implementation Research, Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bedford, Massachusetts, and an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.
“The burden of prevention may therefore lie at a social or employer level—for example, through avoidance of shift work when possible.”
