Night shift work is associated with the development of CVDs and breast cancer. However, the role of circadian rhythm is less known in night shift work related CVDs and hormone related cancers.
This proposed 3-year’s project will employ UK biobank to investigating the role of circadian rhythm in night shift work induced adverse health effect. Information on sleep, chronotype, and shift work will be extracted from baseline database. Clock genes, melatonin receptor genes and sleep related genes will be used as the surrogate of circadian rhythm. The primary outcomes are newly diagnosed cases of CVDs, breast cancer, ovarian cancer or prostate cancer during follow-up period. The secondary outcomes are all-cause mortality, CVDs mortality, all-cancer mortality, and cause-specific mortality from breast cancer, ovarian cancer or prostate cancer. Multivariate cox regression model and Mendelian randomization analysis will be used to calculate hazard ratios of CVDs and hormone related cancer. Stratification analyses will be performed by different age group, sex, and sleep duration to evaluate the variations of their effects.
We anticipated that circadian rhythms play a key role in night shift work induced risk for CVDs and hormone related cancer. This study will provide evidence to find effective method or strategy by individual circadian rhythm that may reduce the adverse effect of night shift work.
