Night work can damage your DNA: study

Hong Kong: Do you often work as a night shift? Lack of sleep and nighttime sleep can damage the structure of human DNA and lead to many diseases, including cancer and diabetes, as well as cardiovascular, neurological and pulmonary diseases, warns a study.

The study, published in the academic journal Anesthesia, shows that the expression of the DNA repair gene is initially lower in night workers and decreases further after acute sleep deprivation, which reinforces the thesis that night workers demonstrate a repair of altered DNA.

The results showed that people forced to work all night had 30% higher DNA fractures than those who were not forced to work at night, and that the damage to the patient was significantly higher. DNA are further increased by more than 25% after a night of acute sleep deprivation.

"Damage to DNA is a change in the basic structure of DNA that is not repaired when DNA is replicated," said SW Choi, a research badociate at the University of California. University of Hong Kong. "Double-strand breaks are especially dangerous because the failure of the repair causes genomic instability and cell death, whereas decay can lead to inappropriate end junction events that generally underlie oncogenic transformation, "added Choi.

For the study, the team examined a small group of full-time, healthy doctors, aged 28 to 33, who donated a blood sample after three days of adequate sleep. Doctors who worked at night then took extra blood the next morning as a result of acute sleep deprivation.

"The study demonstrates that sleep disturbances are badociated with damage to the DNA," said Choi. In addition, broader prospective studies of the relationship between DNA damage and the development of chronic disease are warranted, and methods to relieve or repair DNA damage related to deprivation of life. sleep should be studied, suggested Choi.