I just finished reading this article that predicted adaptation to (night) shift using computational biology. I thought that this figure presented in the paper nicely captures the consequences 
of night shift work (shaded green) following some time off (shaded red) and a “day” of sleep (shaded blue). The second, third, and fourth rows are of greatest interest because they capture the accumulation of sleepiness that persists across a shift work schedule. Considering that a large proportion of people engaging in night shift work are in the health or manufacturing profession, do you really want these individuals to diagnose or treat you or operate heavy machinery?
Svetlana Postnova, Peter Robinson, Dmitry Postnov (2013). Adaptation to Shift Work: Physiologically Based Modeling of the Effects of Lighting and Shifts’ Start Time PLoS One
3 Comments until now
Nice one Svetlana
I presume you know her? I’ve been real impressed with her work. She had a paper similar to this one in JBR in early 2012. I definitely feel like an idiot reading these papers because of my lack of knowledge of computational biology. This is some really complex stuff. However, it’s nice to see this conducted in human shift workers. It definitely lends some translational significance to a study that we are hoping to publish soon. We got animals on a long schedule of weekly shift work and are looking at daily changes in sleep-wake as well as some immune responses.
We’ve been employed under the same training grant in sleep http://www.cirus.org.au
The physics arm of our grant makes us feel like idiots too…
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