Saturday, December 25, 2010

Shifts



Years ago, when people were talking about working, it could be a happy topic for today's people. The reason why is because when people were talking about their respective careers and jobs back then, they were talking about the working time frame as in 5-day jobs in a week, as well as a fixed working hours in a day.

But for current circumstance, many companies do hope that their workers could work extra hours, not just extra hours, sometimes exaggerated long hours just to meet the company's expectation. In addition, companies nowadays like to follow the trend of having their workers working shifts. It is important to understand that shifts do not comply with normal sleep/ wake rhythm as it disrupts our internal biological clock drastically.

Dr. Ole Ammerpohl, a Kiel human geneticist, took advantage of the fact that identical twins are practically genetically alike, took chances and conducted a research on the relationship of shift work and metabolic disorders. Dr. Ole involved in this research by investigating pairs of identical Danish twins where in each pair, one of them involved in shift works. Working shifts might have direct impact on our genetic make-up and the genes contained within this material.

Gene activities in our body are controlled by switches which is known as DNA methylation. Besides DNA methylation, there are other factors which could contribute to the development of metabolic disorders, such as nutritional & sleeping patterns, hormone and blood counts, those are just the factors among others. Also from Kiel University, Professor Manuela Dittmar mentioned that the consequences of working shifts could further propel higher incidence of civilized diseases such as burn-out syndromes or disability.