In an age where everything is open 24/7, there's a growing number of women and men who now work the graveyard shift accommodating the night owls. It's no longer limited to nurses and flight attendants! The clerks at Walmart, the people working late-night drive-thru windows, and the customer service telephone operators that we call when our computer breaks or our WiFi goes down, are working overnight hours as well. What these night workers may not know is that epidemiological research suggests that working the graveyard shift increases their risk for breast cancer. But the big question remains: Why?
Unfortunately, much of the research on breast cancer has been done on rats and mice. There are certainly some important findings that can come from this type of investigation. However, I have yet to hear of a mouse working the night shift. To find out more about this topic, we need to study women! And if we want to understand the connection between working the night shift and breast cancer, we need to study women who work the night shift and compare them to women who work days.
The Army of Women, a program of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, is currently recruiting for the Shift Work and Breast Cancer Risk Study led by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. We have convinced a scientist to conduct her research on women, and now we need to step up to the plate and participate.
The research team is studying breast tissue samples from women who have not had breast cancer, and who have worked either day or night shifts for at least five consecutive years to better understand how wake/sleep cycle disruptions may increase breast cancer risk. Later, the researchers will compare the samples collected from women who have not had breast cancer to breast tissue samples collected from women with breast cancer. Learn more and sign up for the Shift Work and Breast Cancer Risk Study here.
This study is a good example of the kind of research we desperately need! For all the fundraising we have done, we still don't know the cause of breast cancer. The vast majority of women who get breast cancer have none of the known risk factors. Obviously we are missing something big. So even if you are not a night shift worker, you should consider signing up for the Army of Women. We need to be comparing women with breast cancer to those who haven't been diagnosed. We need to explore the potential environmental links as well as the possibility that a virus could be the cause.
I started the Army of Women initiative, funded through a grant by the Avon Foundation for Women, as a way to help researchers connect directly with women who are interested in participating in breast cancer research studies. Volunteers sign up at www.armyofwomen.org and get an email alert every time a new study is seeking volunteers (once or twice a month). You get to decide which one you fit and/or are comfortable participating in. Some studies are as simple as an online questionnaire while others involve giving blood, spit or even tissue samples. And if you don't fit the study, we ask you to pass it on to everyone you know.
We have amazed the scientific community by our ability to recruit study participants from across the country and throughout the world, saving researchers significant time and money. Join more than 354,000 women -- and a few good men -- who are willing to go the next step in eradicating breast cancer. The Army of Women needs YOU!