Study: Most people working night shifts develop some kind of sleep disorder

A recent study has suggested that most people who regularly work night shifts suffer from some kind of sleep disorder, including insomnia. In the study, which was published in Frontiers in Psychiatry on Dec 7, researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium collected work and sleep data from 37,662 individuals.

"In this cross-sectional study, prevalence rates of short sleep (≤6 h), long sleep (≥9 h) and sleep disorders (screened with Holland Sleep Disorders Questionnaire), and associations between these sleep variables and socio-demographics (age, sex, education, living companion(s)) were analyzed using binominal logistic regression analyses," the study said.

"Shift work is related not only to curtailed sleep and shift work disorder but also to a plethora of sleep disorders, including insomnia, sleep-related breathing disorders and sleep-related movement disorders," it added.

The findings

Researchers said that in the total sample, all socio-demographic factors affected prevalences of short, long, and disordered sleep, consistent with previous studies. "Compared to day workers, shift workers more frequently reported short sleep, most prominently night workers (26 vs. 50%) (p< 0.001)," the researchers said.

Six common sleep disorder categories were screened for the surveys - insomnia, hypersomnia, parasomnia, sleep-related breathing disorders, sleep-related movement disorders, and circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders.

"In night shift workers the level of education had the strongest associations with disturbed sleep with a two-fold higher prevalence of short and disordered sleep in low relative to academic educated groups (allp< 0.02)," the study further said.

Over a quarter of regular night-shift workers (26 per cent) reported more than two or three sleep disorders, and 51 per cent of people working such shifts tested positive for at least one sleep disorder.

Rotational shifts suggested

Professor Marike Lancel from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands told Science Alert, "We showed that compared to working regular shifts during daytime hours, working other shift types is associated with a higher occurrence of disordered sleep, particularly in rotating and regular night shift work."

The researchers suggested that rotational shifts were generally advised, particularly fast-forward rotating work schedules, with "night work as short as possible and plenty of resting days in between to recover from the accumulated sleep deficit."

"To prevent sleep curtailment and sleep disorders, employers/occupational health practitioners should encourage good sleep health and give tools to deal with shift work as well as possible, both promoting optimal sleep during the resting period and wakefulness during working hours," they added.