As a study published by The BMJ suggests, women who work intermittent night turns and do not follow a healthy lifestyle have an especially high risk of suffering from type 2 diabetes.
It is well established that unhealthy lifestyle habits such as smoking, maintaining poor diet and exercising little, as well as having overweight or obesity, increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.It has been included in the list of factors.
However, researchers believe that this is the first study that analyzes the combined impact of an unhealthy lifestyle and rotary night work on the risk of type 2 diabetes.
In the study, data from two long -term health studies were combined in nurses, the Nursing Health Study (NHS) and NHS II, which recruited US nurses in 1976 and 1989. Data remote about 143 410 women without type 2 diabetes,cardiovascular disease or cancer that had completed medical, food and lifestyle questionnaires at regular intervals.
For this study, the work on rotary night shift was defined as working at least three night shifts per month, in addition to the day and night shifts of that month.
The unhealthy lifestyle was defined using four factors: having overweight or obesity (body mass index of 25 or more), having ever smoked, doing less than 30 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous intensity exercise and having a poor diet(Low in fruits, vegetables and high in processed meats, trans fats, sugar and salt).
For 22-24 years of follow-up, 10 915 of the 143 410 nurses reported a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. For every five years of work in rotary night shifts, nurses had almost a third (31%) more likely to havebeen diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
Each unhealthy lifestyle factor, being a smoker, having overweight or obesity, having a low quality diet or a low level of physical activity, increased more than double (2.3 times) the risk of being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
The authors calculated that the work in rotary night shifts represented approximately 17% of the major combined risk of type 2 diabetes, the unhealthy lifestyle around 71% and the remaining 11% was an additional risk related to the interaction of the interaction of thetwo.
