
Call center employees often work night shifts.
A new study in the medical field found that night shifts are not a factor which triggers breast cancer. This goes against previous findings of specialized studies. The new research from British specialists is also based on other studies in the field.
There are several studies which tried to determine the causes which led to cancer. One of this studies showed that night shirts stand as a potential cause. A survey conducted nine years ago suggested that women who work night shifts are more prone to developing breast cancer than those who have a job during the day exclusively.
The study in 2007 was led by specialists at the International Agency for Research on Cancer. They explained that there is a link between the way our body clock works and the risk of breast cancer. Disturbing the circadian rhythm led to a higher danger of getting breast cancer, as health experts stressed back in 2007.
The new research from British doctors denies this possibility. They state that night shifts are not on the list of potential causes for breast cancer. Their results are based on studies involving more than one million women. They participated in ten different studies.
These ten studies are not the only ones that the British researchers took into consideration. Other three significant studies provided them with information on additional eight hundred thousand cases. Reviews from other countries were also important, such as those published in the Netherlands, Sweden, China and the United States.
What the researchers did was to compare women who only worked by day to those who had night shift jobs. They wanted to determine which one of this two categories had more chances to develop breast cancer. The findings show that the risk of the disease is the same for both categories.
The specialists in charged of the research stress that they didn’t only investigate women who had night shifts for short period of time. On the contrary, some of the participants had such a timetable for more than twenty or thirty years. As far as their chances of developing breast cancer are concerned, they are equal to that of women who had or have a full-time job during the day.
Several institutions in the United Kingdom were involved in the study. The UK Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK are just two of them.
The results of the new study were published in Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Image courtesy of: Pexels