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Approved research

Non-standard employment schedule resilience: A multifactorial approach

Principal Investigator: Professor Melinda Mills
Approved Research ID: 32696
Approval date: June 25th 2018

Lay summary

Non-standard schedules ? shift and night work ? have been studied primarily in relation to detrimental consequences of health and disease outcomes. The aim of this study is to shift to understanding the antecedents or multiple psychosocial, environmental and genetic factors that contribute to an individual?s resilience to remain in non-standard schedules. Key psychosocial, environmental and genetic factors include the ability to cope with: employment conditions and work strain (including commuting, working conditions), duration and regularity of nonstandard hours, psychosocial strain and well-being, chronotype (sleep, morning or evening preference), genetic factors and satisfaction and structure of family relationships. This project will contribute to a better understanding of modifiable employment practices to support workers engaged in non-standard schedules and their families. In this way it meets the UK Biobank?s core access policy of focussing on health-related material that is also in the public interest. Nonstandard work schedules will be examined with a focus on occurrence of shift or night shifts, intensity (number of days and rest periods) and duration in shift (taking into account employment history). Analyses will examine the cross-sectional association with non-standard shifts and multiple factors, but by integrating employment history, take in account the duration within this type of current job (i.e., resilience), intensity (number of hours, consecutive shifts, rest periods) and frequency. The PI and research group have multiple publications on non-standard schedules and GWAS of complex behavioural phenotypes (e.g., two Nature Genetics in 2016). The full cohort would be examined to compare those in non-standard schedules (case) and those outside of these schedules (control). Of the 287,857 participants available (of 301,199 items of data), 51,490 have a job that involves shift work sometimes (22,191), usually (6,352) or always (22,970). Of the 50,952 participants available (of 52,254 items), 26,305 work night shifts sometimes (14,843), usually (4,090) or always (7,371). These also vary by the regularity and job history.

Scope extension:

Non-standard schedules shift and night work have been studied primarily in relation to detrimental consequences of health and disease outcomes. The aim of this study is to shift to understanding the antecedents or multiple psychosocial, environmental and genetic factors that contribute to an individual's resilience to remain in non-standard schedules. Key psychosocial, environmental, and genetic factors include the ability to cope with: employment conditions and work strain (including commuting, working conditions), duration and regularity of nonstandard hours, psychosocial strain and well-being, chronotype (sleep, morning or evening preference), genetic factors and satisfaction and structure of family relationships.

 

In a further step, we want to take a more holistic look at the issue of standard and non-standard work and occupations. First, we want to explore similarities of chronotypes among partners since the resilience to non-standard work schedules also depends on the family structure and relationship status and satisfaction. Secondly, an important facet, which has not yet received attention in the social science genomics literature, concerns occupational status. We, thus, plan to perform GWAS analysis using employment histories from UK Biobank to construct sociologically informed measures of occupational status. The derived variables (e.g. using standard well-accepted SIOPS, ISEI, and CAMSIS occupational scores) will be returned to the UK Biobank team accordingly. We plan to accompany this analysis by using NSDC genetic data for our out-of-sample prediction analyses. We also plan to study work histories not only through the notions of occupational status but also through sex-specific occupations and occupational choices. Here, we plan to expand our GWAS to sex-stratified analyses as well as to study occupations that are atypical for men and women. It is well known that the typical occupational profile of men and women differs greatly. At the same time, we know little about the extent to which, in addition to environmental influences, genetic factors affect the willingness of men and women to enter occupations that are atypical for them.

Current scope

It is still a lack of evidence of gene-environment interaction in relation to GDM. The proposed study is to examine whether diet, physical activity, and other lifestyle factors may interact with the genetic variations in relation to GDM.

New scope

The proposed study is to examine whether lifestyle and environment factors, as well as other exposure factors throughout full life circle, may interact with the genetic variations in relation to diabetes, hypertension, other cardiometabolic diseases, and mortality.