Shift work, also known as working antisocial hours, can be responsible for sleep disorders and your health, but a new study has found that a decade of taking on this kind of job can age the brain by more than six years, according to BBC News.
Although some recovery was reportedly found after people stopped with their shift work, it took five years for them to return to their normal state. Shift work reportedly disrupts the body's internal clock and have affected people in the form of shift work sleep disorder, obesity and even breast cancer.
Aside from it being bad for your social life, sleep schedule, and overall health, shift work also reportedly has a chronic effect on your ability to think, according to CNN.
For the study, which was published in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, researchers in France and the UK reportedly followed employed and retired workers in southern France who have worked in this specific industry for various periods of time over the course of a decade.
"It was quite a substantial decline in brain function, it is likely that when people trying to undertake complex cognitive tasks then they might make more mistakes and slip-ups, maybe one in 100 makes a mistake with a very large consequence, but it's hard to say how big a difference it would make in day-to-day life," stated Dr. Phillip Tucker, part of the research team in Swansea.
People who work shifts shouldn't be too frightened by the results of the recent study, as recovery is always an option, despite the amount of time it takes to get your body functioning normally again.
"The reversibility is a really exciting finding because no one else has shown it and no matter how compromised a person may be there's always hope of recovery," stated Dr. Michael Hastings, from the UK Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
For those who need to hold on to shift work for longer, Dr. Tucker has suggested that "there are ways to mitigate the effects in the way you design work schedules and regular medical check-ups should include cognitive performance tests to look for danger signs."
