2023-08-28 07:00:00
This is a little known reality: in the contingent of Augustians who are returning to work these days, and in general in the French population, almost half of the working people work, full time or occasionally, on so-called atypical schedules. The negative impact of this rhythm on health is, however, increasingly well known.
Latest study, a gigantic work of theyork university, in Toronto, published on Wednesday, August 23, focusing on the working conditions of 48,000 Canadians. Result: “Exposure to night and shift work is associated with an increased risk of cognitive impairment” among those over 45 years old.
How many exactly are there, these pilots, hospital staff, catering, hotels or service professions, working outside the traditional 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.? In 2021, over four weeks, it was estimated that 45%, or more than 10 million employees, were subject to an atypical schedule at least once. And last year, INED demonstrated that low-skilled women “were increasingly exposed”.
For night or shift workers, that is to say whose time slots change regularly, beyond an obvious impact on social life, we observe “a disturbance of the internal clock and a debt of sleep which accumulates and which induces chronobiological stress”, warns Pierre Philip, head of the university department of sleep medicine at the Bordeaux University Hospital and creator of the popularization account on Instagram @pr.philip.
Minimum seven hours of sleep per night
Our internal clock, or biological clock, is a kind of metronome that constantly beats the measure of our body’s activity. She commands him to distinguish activity and rest, and therefore time of wakefulness and sleep. But to work on its own, this mechanism needs two things: rest, at least seven hours a day, and regeneration in natural daylight.
“The majority of people have a neutral chronotype, that is to say that they are wide awake between 8 a.m. and 11 p.m., some get up earlier, others later, but this remains a minority”, specifies Marie Lacroix , Doctor of Neuroscience. But the system can go wrong – in the event of large variations in bedtime or wake-up time or overexposure to artificial light or screens – or even break down – workers working three-shift shifts and flight crew know a thing or two about it. thing.
The sleep disturbances generated are reflected first of all in increased drowsiness: night workers therefore have more car accidents on their return journey and accidents at work. But health is also permanently damaged: “Overweight, diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease”, list Faïza Bossy, general practitioner and lecturer on occupational health. Several organs, such as the kidneys or the liver, are indeed very punctuated by the biological clock. A correlation has also been found between night work and breast cancer in women.
Effects on the brain that can “lead to cognitive impairment”
Depression, anxiety, irritability and even personality disorders are also more frequently observed among night workers. “From the moment we do not sleep enough, and in a satisfactory way, we observe effects at the level of the brain which can lead to cognitive disorders in the long term”, develops Faïza Bossy.
In the Canadian study, the researchers believe that memory mechanisms are impacted in night workers. Whereas for employees on rotation, it is the responsible executive function, mobilized when faced with a new situation and having to solve a problem, which is altered.
With, at the end of the chain, risks of neurodegenerative diseases? “One of the hypotheses is that there is an accumulation of proteins in the brain which would have an impact on the development of certain diseases such as Alzheimer’s”, confides Pierre Philip, sleep doctor.
Be careful not to paint too black a picture. “When the patients adopt a good rhythm of life and that they rest well during the day, we do not see more problems than the others”, nuance Faïza Bossy. For her, “the real problem is adaptation”. It’s all in the art of resynchronization.
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