Wake up call for night shift people; diseases may be knocking at your door

Washington: Watch out night shift staff! Staying awake for work whole night can take a toll on your health as a new research published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says it can disrupt levels and time of day patterns of more than 100 proteins in the blood.Such proteins can influence blood sugar, energy metabolism, and immune function, according to the study.

The findings could open the door for developing new treatments for night shift workers, who make up about 20 per cent of the global workforce and are at higher risk for diabetes and cancer and also enable doctors to precisely time administration of drugs, vaccines and diagnostic tests around the circadian clock.

"This tells us that when we experience things like jet lag or a couple of nights of shift work, we very rapidly alter our normal physiology in a way that if sustained can be detrimental to our health," said the paper's senior author Kenneth Wright, director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at University of Colorado Boulder.

The study is the first to examine how protein levels in human blood, also known as the plasma proteome, vary over a 24-hour period and how altered sleep and meal timing affects them, Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.The study also pinpointed 30 distinct proteins that, regardless of sleep and meal timing, vary depending upon what internal circadian time it is.

"If we know the proteins that the clock regulates, we can adjust timing of treatments to be in line with those proteins," said the paper's lead author Christopher Depner, a postdoctoral researcher in the university's Department of Integrative Physiology.The researchers recruited six healthy male subjects in their 20s to spend six days, with their meals, sleep, activity and light exposure tightly controlled.

On days one and two, the men stuck to a normal schedule. Then they were gradually transitioned to a simulated night-shift work pattern, in which they had eight hour sleep opportunities during the day and stayed up all night, eating then.

Researchers drew blood every four hours and assessed levels and time-of-day-patterns of 1,129 proteins. They found 129 proteins whose patterns were thrown off by the simulated night shift."By the second day of the misalignment we were already starting to see proteins that normally peak during the day peaking at night and vice versa," Depner said.

One of those proteins was glucagon, which prompts the liver to push more sugar into the bloodstream. When subjects stayed awake at night, levels not only surged at night instead of day but also peaked at higher levels.Long-term, this pattern could help explain why night-shift workers tend to have higher diabetes rates, Depner said.(UNI)