Reduced Tolerance to Night Shift in Chronic Shift Workers: Insight From Fractal Regulation.

ABSTRACT: Healthy physiology is characterized by fractal regulation (FR) that generates similar structures in the fluctuations of physiological outputs at different time scales. Perturbed FR is associated with aging and age-related pathological conditions. Shift work, involving repeated and chronic exposure to misaligned environmental and behavioral cycles, disrupts circadian coordination. We tested whether night shifts perturb FR in motor activity and whether night shifts affect FR in chronic shift workers and non-shift workers differently. We studied 13 chronic shift workers and 14 non-shift workers as controls using both field and in-laboratory experiments. In the in-laboratory study, simulated night shifts were used to induce a misalignment between the endogenous circadian pacemaker and the slee

SUBMITTER: Li P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6317507 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature