A large study finds that shift workers have a higher risk for depression and anxiety. How they live, or lifestyle factors, is largely tied to their risk.
The study, which was published Aug. 14 in JAMA Network Open, focused on 175,543 people. Of them, 16.2% said they were shift workers. Data was collected from 2006 to 2010 and was analyzed between 2022 and 2023. Shift work was defined as working outside of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Many long-term care workers are defined as shift workers.
The researchers looked at how often people worked shifts (never, sometimes, usually, or always), the type of shift they worked (like night shift workers compared to non-night shift workers), and how many years they worked shift work.
As a result of their findings, the authors say that shift work should be classified as an occupational hazard. They followed up on the people for just over nine years. During that time span, 2.3% developed depression and 1.7% had anxiety. There wasn’t a difference in the anxiety depression whether the people worked nights or days. The longer people worked shifts was negatively linked to depression and anxiety.
The researchers looked at which factors that people could modify to improve their depression and/or anxiety. Those included smoking, time spent being sedentary, body mass index, and the time spent sleeping. Those factors made up 31.3% of the link between shift work and depression and 21.2% of the association between shift work and anxiety.
“Although the harm of shift work depends on a variety of factors (e.g., socioeconomic status, access to social resources), it is generally considered to be significantly associated with behavioral lifestyles, as shift work is often associated with low income, poor environment, and subjective stress, which are more likely to lead to unhealthy lifestyles,” the authors said.
