Impacts of Night Shifts on Brain Connectivity and ALFF among Medical Personnel

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre 

Night shift is a prevalent workstyle in medical hospitals, demanding continuous health monitoring and rapid decision making of medical professionals. Night shifts may cause serious health problems to medical staff, including cognitive impairments, poor sleep, and lowered brain functionality [1, 2]. In the Taiwanese medical field, the consecutive rotation of 3–5-night shifts in a row are a common schedule across medical staffs [3]. However, how long the aversive impact lasts remain to be studied. Hence, we designed repeated measures of brain functions following the night shifts and subsequent recovery among medical shift workers. Accordingly, we hypothesized that the functional connectivity in default-mode network (DMN) and dorsal attention network (DAN) may be altered after night shifts and recovered after circadian realignments, as well as the functional index of amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (ALFF).