{"id":1604,"date":"2023-08-02T15:01:35","date_gmt":"2023-08-02T05:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/?p=1604"},"modified":"2023-08-03T09:04:14","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T23:34:14","slug":"understanding-sleep-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/2023\/08\/02\/understanding-sleep-loss\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding how sleep loss affects young shift workers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Increasing awareness about sleep disorders affecting people of all ages is opening a gateway to advanced sleep health, with Flinders University researchers finding new ways to diagnose and manage sleep problems.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cPoor sleep affects people\u2019s health in so many ways, and in recent years we have learned just how common some sleep disorders are,\u201d says Associate Professor Amy Reynolds, Co-Lead of the Insomnia, Shift Work and Body Clock Disruption team at Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute Sleep Health (FHMRI, formerly Adelaide Institute of Sleep Health). \u201c20 per cent of young people have a sleep disorder that needs treatment \u2013 and this figure doubles by the time people reach middle age.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy research is particularly interested in the ways that work, sleep and health interact, and I\u2019m currently doing work with young shift workers who have sleep problems and are impacted by sleeping out of sync with their body clocks.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A trial conducted through 2022, funded by the Flinders Foundation, aimed to identify and diagnose the types of sleep disorders being suffered by young Paramedicine students before they had to start doing shift work, as a way of identifying clinical sleep disorders that could be treated early.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBoth of my parents worked as volunteer paramedics, and mum was a nurse; I grew up listening to their stories about the difficulties of trying to get enough sleep when they did shift work. It sparked an interest that I\u2019ve been able to carry through into focused research,\u201d says Associate Professor Reynolds.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLast year we found that if young adults have a sleep disorder and they also work night shifts, their mental health is much more impacted than those without this combination of influencing factors. It\u2019s a significant concern for the individuals, but also amounts to lost productivity through absenteeism due to sleep disorders in our workplaces.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Associate Professor Reynolds recently delivered a report to SafeWork SA about the experiences of fatigue and sleep disorders among paramedics, which highlights there is much work to be done educating and providing options for the management of sleep in shift workers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf we get onboard early in a person\u2019s working life to identify sleep disorders, we could make changes that will have a big bearing on their lives,\u201d she says. \u201cWe need to be raising awareness and supporting sleep from early adulthood.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt all points to a real need to reduce the stigma that surrounds sleep disorders, and show young adults that getting treatment early could provide huge benefits for their health and safety.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Associate Professor Reynolds\u2019 work forms an important plank within the broader sleep health research program at Flinders University, unlocking a complex puzzle to identify and then combat sleep disorders. \u201cI\u2019m one piece of a big, awesome, multi-disciplinary team,\u201d she says, \u201cand our particular areas of interest and expertise have overlap, so our shared insights are forming a more complete picture about sleep health.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Increasing awareness about sleep disorders affecting people of all ages is opening a gateway to advanced sleep health, with Flinders University researchers finding new ways to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1448,"featured_media":1606,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5471,828,2075,2081],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2023-mph-alumni-magazine","category-college-of-medicine-and-public-health","category-study-health","category-study-medicine"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1448"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.flinders.edu.au\/alumni-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}