Night shifts unlikely to cause breast cancer

British scientists have recently found that working night shifts is unlikely to increase the risk of breast cancer, clarifying a previous study on the effect of night shifts on women.

The new research, funded by the British Health and Safety Executive (HSE), Cancer Research U.K. and the U.K. Medical Research Council, was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on Thursday.

It followed 1.4 million women in ten studies and analyzed data from studies in the United States, China, Sweden and the Netherlands.

It's the largest study on this issue, the BBC quoted one of the research members as saying.

"We found that women who had worked night shifts, including long-term night shifts, were not more likely to develop breast cancer," said Ruth Travis, lead author and cancer scientist at the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford.

Comparing women with and without night shift work experiences, the new study founded that night shifts has "little or no effect on breast cancer incidence in women," said Professor Andrew Curran, chief scientific adviser for the HSE.

However Curran also warned that there are a number of other known risks with shift work that harm people's health.

A study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2007 said that shift work is a probable cause of cancer, including breast cancer, as it disrupts an individual's "body clock."

Referring to new updated research, scientists explained that the 2007 review was mainly based on studies of animals and lab record