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The Dangers of Shift Work: Losing more than just sleep

Millions of Americans work the night shift and most of them know their job is killing their sleep.
What they don’t know is it could also kill them.
It nearly killed Eric Phillippi, 24.
Phillippi was working the grave yard shift from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. three nights a week and was a full-time college student in Nashville with an active social life.
When he wasn’t working, Phillippi kept normal hours and averaged about six to seven hours of sleep. He gave his body little to no time to transition from his work schedule to his day schedule.
“My sleep schedule was very screwed,” he said.
Then one afternoon, while driving on a busy road it all caught up with him. He closed his eyes.
“I was trying my best to stay awake, but I shut my eyes and veered into right lane and ran into a truck.”
He was shaken up, but not injured. His car was totaled.
Unfortunately, his story is not that unusual, according to sleep experts.
“The price we pay for pushing ourselves and our workers to the work late into the evening and at night is that it encroaches upon our ability to exercise, to have free time”What sleep we get becomes shorter and shorter in total time allowed,” said Dr. Jim Stocks, a sleep expert and pulmonologist at the University of Texas Medical Center in Tyler, Texas.
The latest research presented at Sleep 2007, the 21st annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies gives further proof that late-night shift work can be detrimental.
One study examined medical students, and another nurses, who worked the night shift. Both studies found that errors were more common in those who worked extended or night shifts. The studies also showed the medical students fell asleep while studying or in lectures because they were so tired.
Stocks said the results are typical, but those particularly vulnerable are those who work the second and third shifts because “when they want to go to sleep, they are really not able to go to sleep efficiently.”
Most people work five or six days a week and have one or two days off.
Unfortunately, for the night shift worker, the days off add to the problem. Most night shift workers will “immediately try to get back to the schedule the rest of the world enjoys. And so shift workers go back and forth between their work and sleep hours. Every week in consequence, their body clocks, their internal clocks, don’t have to get reset.”
That was the case with Phillippi. When he got off work on at 8 a.m. on Monday morning, he said he would sleep till noon then attend class and resume his normal college schedule.
“It was hard,” he said. “The key thing getting my week schedule on track was stay up all day to where try to go to sleep on Monday night.”
But it didn’t always work. He slept through classes or fell asleep in them. He had trouble concentrating.
Looking back, Phillippi said it was hard working the grave-yard shift on the weekend then switching to a regular daytime schedule during the week.
That’s the classic problem, Stocks said.
“If you are a night shift worker and you never ever slept during the night or worked during the day, if you on your day off you kept the same exact schedule, you’ll be able to live reasonably OK in theory. But the reality is that most night shift workers are married to (or live with) people who don’t work at night. So when it comes to their days off, they want to connect with their family and friends and church and everyone else.”
“Shift workers go back and forth and their body is never actually acclimated to a good healthy schedule and as a result, when the do try to sleep, be it on their days off or the days that they work, the sleep that they get during those periods of time is terribly fragmented and not very restful.”
Phillippi maintained his split schedule for about eight months, but after the accident, realized it was not working out.
“Now my sleep is much more steady,” he said. “I get a good six to seven hours sleep at least four to five nights of the week.”

Jim Stocks, M.D., a pulmonologist at the University of Texas Medical Center in Tyler, Texas.
http://www.uthct.edu/resources/directory/profile.asp?id=74
Extended Duration Work Shifts and Preventable Adverse Events: A Risk to Patients and Physicians by L. Barger, N. Ayas, B. Cade, J. Cronin, B. Rosner, F. Speizer and C. Czeisler was presented at Sleep 2007, the 21st annual meeting of the Assocation Professional Sleep Professionals Societies, LLC.
The influence of Sleep Deprivation on Psychomotor Performance in Nurses who Work the Night Shift, by Arlene Johnson, M. Umlauf, K. Brown and M. Weaver was presented at Sleep 2007, the 21st annual meeting of the Assocation Professional Sleep Professionals Societies, LLC.