A team of doctors in the US has said daylight saving time should be ‘eliminated’ because it can damage people’s health.
They said shifting the clocks back and forth every year leads to a rise in the number of heart attacks and strokes and can affect children’s brain development.
Young children, the elderly, women and people with cancer appear to be more susceptible to the effects of the time shift.
Dr Beth Malow and Dr Kanika Bagai, from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and Dr Olivia Veatch from the University of Pennsylvania expressed their concerns in a journal.
Daylight saving currently pushes time forward an hour in spring, and pulls it back an hour in autumn, making sunrise later in summer and earlier in winter.
Europe has already decided to abolish the procedure in two years’ time but in the US whether to use it is decided on a state-by-state basis.
The researchers wrote: ‘Transitions to DST [daylight saving time] have documented detrimental associations with the brain, specifically ischemic stroke, with the risk of myocardial infarction [heart attack] and well-being also affected.
‘A lower quality of sleep, shorter sleep duration, and decreased psychomotor vigilance have also been reported.
‘Additional studies are needed to understand the causes of these detrimental effects and the role of sleep deprivation and circadian disruption.
‘Based on these data, we advocate for the elimination of transitions to DST.’
The team made their comments in an editorial article in the journal JAMA Neurology, which is published by the American Medical Association.
Clock changes and ill health have been linked multiple times in the past and there have been growing calls to abandon daylight saving time altogether.
Europe will stop using DST from 2021, its Parliament decided this year, in a move which could affect the UK as well depending on legislation after Brexit.
In the US, whether people use daylight saving time varies from state to state.
The majority observe the tradition but Arizona and Hawaii, for example, do not.
Others are in various stages of testing its effects or considering sticking to one time zone.
In the UK daylight saving time – in which all time zones jumped forward an hour – this year ran from March to October, and in the US from March to November.
In their editorial the Vanderbilt and Pennsylvania researchers said past research has found the risk of a stroke was ‘significantly’ higher for two days after the switch.
And a review of studies taking in more than 100,000 people found there was a five per cent increase in the number of heart attacks after the spring’s forward change.
These risk increases may be caused by people getting less sleep when the time changes in the middle of the night, which could increase heart rate and blood pressure.
People’s mental wellbeing has also been seen to get worse when the clocks change.
And studies on schoolchildren found they were more likely to become sleepy in the daytime and to sleep less at night, which could damage the development of their young brains.
The doctors added: ‘While it is unclear how disruptive a one-hour time change is to otherwise healthy individuals, it is possible that individuals with extreme manifestations of chronotype [morning/evening person] or circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders, neurological disorders, or children and adolescents whose brains are still developing are more susceptible to the adverse health effects that occur following the DST transition.’
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We don’t have that sh*t here in Az. They’ve known for awhile DST is unhealthy, but it’s all to increase work hours. Working us to death.