New research suggests that people who work frequent night shifts have a higher risk of developing hypertension, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. According to the findings published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, people who slept too much or too little when not working also had a higher risk.
People with otherwise healthy lives were found to have a higher risk for cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure, also called hypertension, when they worked shifts.
Working night shifts can be dangerous to health in both hypertensive individuals and healthy individuals
Dr. Yongping Bai, Associate Professor
Department of geriatric medicine, Central South University, China
The aim of a new study is to examine how shift work contributes to the progression of high blood pressure into cardiometabolic multimorbidity, defined by the researchers as high blood pressure combined with diabetes, coronary heart disease, or stroke.
“Since shift work is increasingly common and hypertension is a leading risk factor for cardiometabolic multimorbidity, it is crucial to clarify the association between shift work and cardiometabolic multimorbidity risks,” said the study’s senior author Dr. Yongping Bai, an associate professor in the department of geriatric medicine at Xiangya Hospital of Central South University in Changsha, China
