Women who work nights face ‘cancer’

MIAMI: Women who regularly work the night shift may face a 19 percent higher risk of cancer than those who work during the day, said a study on Monday. These heightened risks were not apparent among female night-shift workers in Australia and Asia, said the meta-analysis in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention. "Our study indicates that night shift work serves as a risk factor for common cancers in women," said study author Xuelei Ma, an oncologist at the West China Medical Centre of Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. "We were surprised to see the association between night shift work and breast cancer risk only among women in North America and Europe," he added.