The headlines accompanying a recent study in the British
Medical Journal made it sound as if shift workers should immediately contact
their lawyers to make sure their wills are in order and to order up as much
life insurance as they could possibly muster because shift work, the headlines
screamed, is bad bad bad for a person’s health.
But if you’re a shift worker and if those headlines
haven’t yet scared you into suffering a heart attack or worse, relax because
the study was not nearly as condemnatory of shift work as you might have been
led to believe.
Thus, while in this study which combined the findings from
34 other studies, shift word was indeed associated with about a 25 % higher
risk of heart attack and a roughly 5 % higher risk of stroke, there was no
increased risk of death in shift workers.
In fact, the researchers described the negative effects of
shift work as “modest” and when you look more closely at the numbers, the kind
of increased risk of heart attack and stroke is easily mitigated by doing more
exercise.
