How many men connect prostate health with their sleep habits? I’m guessing not that many, and yet much attention is currently focused on the importance of 7-8 hours of sleep for good heart health, overall physical function, and mental/emotional wellness. What about the humble prostate gland? Here are some thoughts from recent research.

Sleep, circadian rhythm and cancer

Everyone has an internal clock that operates on a cycle of roughly 24 hours. It’s called a circadian rhythm, and it regulates when you feel sleepy, when you sleep, and when you want to eat. It’s orchestrated by complex systems. At the same time, it influences other complex systems that include how you metabolize energy, how healthy your immune system is, your endocrine (hormonal) balance, and how cells proliferate. Constant disruptions in one’s circadian clock can set up conditions for “adverse health outcomes, including metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular diseases, infections, and cancer.”^[i] These conditions are linked with the development of cancer in the following endocrine organs: breast, ovaries, testicles, prostate, thyroid, pituitary, and adrenal gland. With specific regard to prostate cancer (PCa), Savvidis et al. note that “… environmental, lifestyle, and circadian rhythm disruptions may contribute to PCa formation. … Sleep patterns, sleep quality, and duration are also factors that may affect PCa risk.”

This brings up a couple of particular aspects of our modern lifestyle that play havoc with circadian wellness: shift work and digital screens. Regarding the first, since the Industrial Revolution we have seen technologies that enable work to get done around the clock, usually in three 8-hour shifts: morning, afternoon, and night. According to one work management resource, “Rotating shifts are known to help distribute the burden of less desirable hours but can also pose challenges for workers’ work-life balance and health.” Many jobs involve night-time staffing: airline pilots, hospital workers, law enforcement, firefighters, factory workers, etc. Offshore petroleum rigs keep workers busy on a 24/7 basis, and rollover shift work increased PCa risk over time. “Compared with day work only, an increased hazard of aggressive prostate cancer was found in workers exposed to ≥19.5 years of rollover shift work.”^[ii]

Blue light

With regard to digital screens, awareness is increasing that exposure to artificial light at night (ALAN) interrupts one’s internal clock, particularly “blue light”, meaning light in short wavelengths. Blue light is not a bad thing. As a WedMD blogger writes, “Have you ever woken up to bright morning skies feeling energized? A big reason for your mood is the high-intensity blue light coming from the sun. Among the visible light spectrum, blue wavelengths have the most powerful effect on your sleep-wake internal body clock.”

By day, nature provides blue light when you’re outdoors, or sunlight is streaming in through the windows. But artificial blue light is available right in your home or your pocket, around the clock; the primary sources of ALAN are laptops, computers, televisions, tablets and smartphones. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Biomedical Physics and Engineering cautions, “While blue wavelengths during the day can enhance attention and reaction times, they are disruptive at night and are associated with a wide range of health problems such as poor sleep quality, mental health problems, and increased risk of some cancers.”^[iii]

Therefore, it stands to reason that good nightly sleep habits preserve a healthy circadian rhythm for optimum prostate (and overall) health. Understandably, if you’re a night shift worker you can’t avoid circadian disruption. The Sleep Foundation offers advice for maximizing rest when your job requires you to flip day and night. But, when it comes to artificial blue light at night, the same organization acknowledges research that the majority of Americans now expose themselves to their devices within an hour of going to bed—not a wise practice if you value the well being of your heart, your mind, your immune system, your prostate gland and so much more! Simply by shutting off your devices earlier in order to reduce the amount of blue light entering through your eyes to your brain can help your circadian rhythm naturally prepare for sleep as well as boost the quality of sleep you get.

Here’s an example of how improved sleep might help prostate cancer patients who go through prostatectomy surgery and have urinary incontinence as a side effect, which is not so unusual after surgery but most cases get better during healing. That said, a 2024 study titled, “Sleep Quality and Urinary Incontinence in Prostate Cancer Patients”^[iv] linked poor sleep with worse incontinence. The evidence showed that PCa patients who suffered from insomnia had longer term urinary leakage during their recovery than those whose problem resolved sooner thanks their good night’s sleep.

This blog is not an Aesop’s fable, but if it were it would have a moral: Let sleep be thy prostate health’s guardian.

NOTE: This content is solely for purposes of information and does not substitute for diagnostic or medical advice. Talk to your doctor if you are experiencing pelvic pain, or have any other health concerns or questions of a personal medical nature.

References

[i] Savvidis C, Kallistrou E, Kouroglou E, Dionysopoulou S et al. Circadian rhythm disruption and endocrine-related tumors. World J Clin Oncol. 2024 Jul 24;15(7):818-834.
[ii] Berge LAM, Liu FC, Grimsrud TK, Babigumira R et al. Night shift work and risk of aggressive prostate cancer in the Norwegian Offshore Petroleum Workers (NOPW) cohort. Int J Epidemiol. 2023 Aug 2;52(4):1003-1014.
[iii] Haghani M, Abbasi S, Abdoli L, Shams SF et al. Blue Light and Digital Screens Revisited: A New Look at Blue Light from the Vision Quality, Circadian Rhythm and Cognitive Functions Perspective. J Biomed Phys Eng. 2024 Jun 1;14(3):213-228.
[iv] Manolitsis I, Feretzakis G, Tzelves L, Anastasiou A et al. Sleep Quality and Urinary Incontinence in Prostate Cancer Patients: A Data Analytics Approach with the ASCAPE Dataset. Healthcare (Basel). 2024 Sep 11;12(18):1817.