Working night shifts during pregnancy may lead to temporary stress on a nurse's heart and circulatory system, highlighting the importance of proper workplace support, a University of Alberta study suggests.
Following 13 healthy nurses who worked days and 12 on nights, all in their second trimester, researchers took readings of their resting blood pressure before and after the participants had each worked one shift.
Although blood pressure remained within normal ranges, the night nurses had significantly higher readings immediately following their shifts, as well as lower pulse pressure, than those who'd worked days, the research showed.
The spikes in blood pressure suggest that even a single night shift could temporarily alter the body's cardiovascular regulation during pregnancy a finding that could help improve workplace care for expectant health-care staff.
"This provides some of the first physiological evidence linking shift work with altered blood pressure in pregnancy. These data support scheduling policies that would allow pregnant nurses to reduce the frequency of working nights," notes graduate researcher Weiqi Ruan, who led the study with professor Margie Davenport.
If night work is unavoidable, longer rest periods between shifts would help nurses recover from blood pressure spikes, and post-shift monitoring could help detect abnormal stress in real time.
Early identification of these sudden, temporary changes to blood pressure in pregnant night workers "may help prevent more serious conditions, such as pre-eclampsia," Ruan adds.
