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A stroke, also known as a brain attack, occurs when blood supply to a part of the brain is interrupted or a blood vessel in the brain bursts.
New research suggests that living against our biological clock can affect our long-term health by altering gut-brain interactions.
While most Americans are getting ready for bed, 15 million individuals are just getting started. These healthcare workers, emergency responders, industrial operators and others are among the 20 percent of the world’s shift workers. Their irregular sleep cycles increase their risk of a variety of health problems, including diabetes, heart attack, cancer and stroke.
However, shift work may have worse consequences than we previously believed. According to a recent study published in the journal Neurobiology of sleep and circadian rhythmsEven after returning to a normal schedule, the negative effects of change activities can persist for a long time.
“Shift work, especially rotating shift work, disrupts our body clocks, which has implications for our health and well-being and human disease,” said David Earnest, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Experimental Therapeutics. Texas A&M University College of Medicine. “When our internal clocks are properly synchronized, they coordinate all of our biological processes to occur during the day or night. When our body clocks go wrong, whether due to shift work or other disruptions, it causes changes in physiological, biochemical processes, and various behaviors.”
Earnest and colleagues found animal models with rotating work schedules had worse stroke outcomes with brain damage and functional impairment relative to normal 24-hour day-night cycles. Men had worse outcomes, with higher mortality rates.
This innovative study took a new approach. Instead of looking at immediate changes in stroke, the researchers switched all individuals to normal 24-hour cycles and waited until middle age — when people are most likely to have a stroke — to assess stroke severity and outcomes.
“Anecdotal evidence from epidemiological studies is that most people experience only shift work within five to eight years and probably return to regular work schedules,” Ernst said. We wanted to determine, are these circadian rhythm disturbances enough to reverse the problems experienced, or do these effects carry over after returning to normal work schedules?
They found that the health effects of shift work persisted over time. The sleep-wake cycles of subjects on shift work schedules did not actually return to normal, even after being exposed to a regular schedule. In the study, compared to controls placed on a regular day-night cycle, they showed consistent changes in their sleep arousal, a period of abnormal activity that sleep would normally occur. When suffering a stroke, women had worse outcomes than the control group, except that they had more severe functional impairment and death than men.
“The data from this study have health-related implications, especially for women, because stroke increases the risk of dementia and disproportionately affects older women,” said Farida Sohrabji, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Experimental Medicine. Women’s Health in Neuroscience Program.
The researchers found increased inflammatory mediators from the throat in subjects exposed to shift work schedules. “What we’re seeing now is that we think the underlying mechanism that causes more severe strokes than circadian rhythm disruption may involve interactions between the brain and the gut,” Earnest said.
The results of this study may ultimately lead to the development of interventions that prevent the negative effects of disrupted circadian rhythms. Meanwhile, shift workers can improve the maintenance of their internal clocks by trying to maintain as regular a schedule as possible and avoiding fatty foods.
This study has obvious implications for flexible workers, but it can be extended to many other people who maintain very different schedules from day to day.
“Because of the computer age, many of us no longer work nine to five. We take our work home and sometimes work late at night,” Earnest said. “Even those of us who work regular schedules have a tendency to take weekends off and produce what’s known as ‘social jet lag’, which throws our body clocks off course. All this causes the same damage to human health as shift work.
To avoid some of these health risks, he says, the best approach is to maintain a regular schedule of waking, sleeping and mealtimes that don’t change from day to day. Also, avoid common cardiovascular risk factors such as a high-fat diet, insufficient physical activity, excessive alcohol consumption, and smoking.
Reference: “Sex Differences in Circulating Cytokine Levels and Pathological Outcome in Midlife Stroke” by David J. Ernst, Shaina Burns, Sivani Pandey, Katresh Kumar Mani and Farida Sohrabji, 30 June 2022. Neurobiology of sleep and circadian rhythms.
DOI: 10.1016/j.nbscr.2022.100079
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
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