Night work, long working hours, psychosocial work stress and cortisol secretion in mid-life: evidence from a British birth cohort
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To examine the relationships between exposure to workplace factors (night work, extended working hours, psychosocial work stress) and cortisol secretion, and to test whether workplace factors interact, resulting in combined effects. METHODS: Multiple linear and logistic regression was used to test relationships between workplace factors and cortisol secretion in the 1958 British birth cohort at 45 years. Salivary cortisol was measured twice on the same day to capture the post-waking decline, facilitating the analysis of different cortisol patterns: (1) time 1 (T1, 45 minutes post-waking); (2) time 2 (T2, 3 h after T1); (3) average 3 h exposure from T1 to T2 cortisol; and (4) T1 to T2 change. To identify altered diurnal cortisol patterns we calculated: (1) flat T1-T2 change in cortisol; (2) top 5% T1; (3) bottom 5% T1; and (4) T1 hypo-secretion or hyper-secretion. Models were adjusted for socioeconomic position at birth and in adulthood, qualifications, marital status, dependent children, and smoking status. RESULTS: 25% of men and 8% of women were exposed to >1 workplace factor (night work, extended work hours, job strain). Night work was associated with a 4.28% (95% CI 1.21 to 7.45) increase in average 3 h cortisol secretion independently of job strain or work hours. Night workers not exposed to job strain had elevated T1 cortisol (5.81%, 95% CI 1.61 to 10.19), although for T2 cortisol it was night workers exposed to low job control who had elevated levels (11.72%, 95% CI 4.40 to 19.55). Men (but not women) working >48 h/week had lower average 3 h cortisol secretion (4.55%, 95% CI -8.43 to -0.50). There were no main effects for psychosocial work stress. All associations for T2 and average 3 h cortisol secretion weakened slightly after adjustment for confounding factors, but associations for T1 cortisol were unaffected by adjustment. CONCLUSIONS: Our study suggests that night work in particular is associated with elevated cortisol secretion and that cortisol dysregulation may exist in subgroups with specific combinations of stressors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".