Obesity in Shift Workers

[pic 1]SHIFT WORKERS AND OBESITY

PREPARED BY:

SUMAIRA LOKHANDWALA

MUHAMMAD ANAS TUFAIL

SHIFT WORKERS AND OBESITY

ABSTRACT:

OBJECTIVE: To discover the association between shift workers (with or without night work) with increased risk of obesity

METHOD: A total of 300 working subjects were analysed and questionnaire were filled by them in this cross sectional study.

RESULTS: Out of 118 non-shift workers 70.3% had higher BMI than the 182 shift workers.32 of the shift workers were hypertensive. Diabetic was not found to be associated with shiftwork.97.8%of the shift worker’s sleep patterns were affected

CONCLUSION: Non-Shift workers were found more prevalent to obesity and had high BMI. Moreover hypertension was high in shift worker along with diabetes. There was a high ratio of female working in shifts as found in our study.

INTRODUCTION:

In order to optimise the productivity and the business competitiveness shift work has become awfully common in several industries and services.1 As the matter of fact, the number of job including scheduled shift works and irregular working hours has extremely increased during the last decades and more than 20% of all the workforce in the developed countries are either working in shifts or during night hours.2 Almost all industries and occupations have employees working in the shifts. Every industry has now designed their employment practices to make use of every hour of the day and provide services around the clock. This trend has been recently adopted by profession in all industries.

Because 24 hour operation is a usual part of different industries, working in shifts or in night hours has become a compulsory condition of employment for an important section of the employees. Following industries are very critical about the shift work:

• Health care
• Communications
• Police
• Transportation
• Fire protection
• Energy and water utilities

Shift work includes Long work hours, work schedules in which employees have to have frequent switches and rotations, long term night shifts. A survey in Europe concluded that almost 17% workers do shifts, 10% do night work, 53% work on weekends and 20% work on call.3 Recent studies shows that the prevalence of overweight and obesity is higher workers working in shift than day workers. Furthermore, the literature shows that shift workers are more prone to gain weight than those workers who are submit to a usual work day.4