Study: Rotating Shift Work Could Boost Risk Of Coronary Heart Disease

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- There are 15-million Americans who do some kind of rotating shift work, including overnights, evenings, and early mornings.

Most of them will tell you that kind of work leaves them pretty tired, but as CBS2's Dr. Max Gomez explained it might also be bad for their hearts.

At night when most of us are heading to bed, many health care workers including nurses are just beginning their work day.

"The link between shift work and coronary heart disease has been an open question for several decades now," Dr. Celine Vetter, Ph.D., Brigham and Women's Hospital explained.

Boston researchers examined the link using surveys from 189,000 women who reported their lifetime exposure to rotating night shift work. The data covered 24 years of follow-up.

"Over the course of the study period a little more than 10,000 cases of newly developed coronary heart disease occurred," Dr. Vetter said.

The study appeared in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association.

"Rotating night shift work is associated with modest risk of coronary heart disease even after taking into account known risk factors such as elevated BMI, smoking, poor diet quality, and low levels of physical activity," Dr. Vetter said.

Rotating shift work was defined as working at least three night shifts per month in addition to morning and evening shifts.

"Even though the absolute risks we observed were small, and the contribution of shift work to coronary heart disease is modest, there is an opportunity to help and prevent coronary heart disease by trying to find out which are the characteristics of shift schedules that may carry the highest risk," Dr. Vetter said.

The longer women did rotating shift work, the greater the risk for heart disease. The good news is that the risk decreases after stopping night shift work.

Heart disease is the number one killer or American women.