This study, however, didn’t look at whether smoking causes breast cancer.
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Adding to the concerns about the damaging impact of shift work on health, a new study has found that irregular sleeping patterns maybe linked to cancer. In this context, those women who had been a smoker for over about 21 years carried triple more chances of dying of any cause, and nearly three and half times more chances of dying due to breast cancer compared to the women who never smoked.
The data presented in the report indicated that the mice gained 20% more weight in spite of consuming food in similar quantity.
“The increase and mistiming of sex hormone production may explain part of the increased risk for hormone-related cancers observed in night shift workers”, the study said.
Kawai told Reuters that unlike earlier studies that have studied the association between smoking and existence among breast cancer patients, their research in among the first to analyze the effect of the span of smoking on consequences for women who has been diagnosed with breast cancer tumors.
Studies have concluded that there is a strong link between smoking and the increased risk of death amongst women who already suffer from breast cancer.
“The conclusion is that chronic changes in light schedules are a driving factor for breast cancer development, weight gain, and other metabolic problems”, van der Horst said.
Mimicking such a situation in a controlled setting using mice is a good way to observe certain factors which should be taken into account when studying humans even though they are more complex.
Van der Horst says that further research is also needed to pinpoint how long people have to be undertaking shift work before the cancer risk becomes significant. However, after experiencing disturbance in their sleeping pattern on a regular basis, the mice got tumors eight weeks in advance.
Another difficulty lies in interpreting what the consequences would be for humans suffering the same sleep pattern differences that the mice were subjected to.
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One argument is disrupting the body’s internal rhythm – or body clock – increases the risk of disease. Not only this study, but previous studies as well, show that circadian disruptions like shift working can be harmful for health.
