Your health: Working nights may increase risk of heart disease
Study: Night shifts and heart disease
Night shifts can cause heart disease, and this raised risk appears to be independent of obvious causes such as an unhealthy diet and lack of exercise, a new study shows.
Researchers found nurses who worked rotating night shifts for 10 years or longer had a 15 percent or higher increased risk of coronary heart disease compared to women who escaped night shift duty, NBC News reports.
It adds to a large body of evidence showing that shift work — especially night shifts — can be bad for health.
“There are a number of known risk factors for coronary heart disease, such as smoking, poor diet, lack of physical activity, and elevated body mass index,” said Celine Vetter of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who led the study. “However, even after controlling for these risk factors, we still saw an increased risk of coronary heart disease associated with rotating shift work.”
7 surgeries account for most deaths
In a paper recently published in JAMA Surgery, researchers found that seven emergency surgeries account for 80 percent of deaths and costs.
The researchers analyzed 421,476 patient records from a national database of hospital inpatients, and discovered that a mere seven procedures accounted for about 80 percent of all admissions, deaths, complications and inpatient costs related to emergency surgeries, The Washington Post reports.
The sample included only adults who underwent a procedure within two days of admission from 2008-2011.
The seven dangerous and costly procedures are mostly related to the organs of the digestive system: removing part of the colon, small-bowel resection, removal of gall bladder, operations related to peptic ulcer disease, removing abdominal adhesions, appendectomy and other operations to open the abdomen.
The authors suggested there's value in having quality benchmarks and cost-reduction strategies focus on these procedures.
“Given their high prevalence nationally and high proportion of burden they represent …. the seven procedures identified in this study could lead to better clinical decision-making, patient outcomes, and cost savings,” the authors wrote.