Review and Special Articles
Adverse Health Effects of Nighttime Lighting: Comments on American Medical Association Policy Statement

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Abstract

The American Medical Association House of Delegates in June of 2012 adopted a policy statement on nighttime lighting and human health. This major policy statement summarizes the scientific evidence that nighttime electric light can disrupt circadian rhythms in humans and documents the rapidly advancing understanding from basic science of how disruption of circadian rhythmicity affects aspects of physiology with direct links to human health, such as cell cycle regulation, DNA damage response, and metabolism. The human evidence is also accumulating, with the strongest epidemiologic support for a link of circadian disruption from light at night to breast cancer. There are practical implications of the basic and epidemiologic science in the form of advancing lighting technologies that better accommodate human circadian rhythmicity.

Section snippets

Electric Lighting in the Modern World

The American Medical Association (AMA) House of Delegates in June of 2012 adopted a policy statement on nighttime lighting and human health.1 The Executive Summary states:

Biological adaptation to the sun has evolved over billions of years. The power to artificially override the natural cycle of light and dark is a recent event and represents a man-made self-experiment on the effects of exposure to increasingly bright light during the night as human societies acquire technology and expand

Recommendations

There are specific recommendations that come from the emerging recognition of the importance of maintaining robust circadian rhythmicity in our daily lives.

The conclusion of the Executive Summary1 is as follows:

Due to the nearly ubiquitous exposure to light at inappropriate times relative to endogenous circadian rhythms, a need exists for further multidisciplinary research on occupational and environmental exposure to light-at-night, the risk of cancer, and effects on various chronic diseases.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by The Institute for Integrative Health (GCB) and in part by grant 1R21CA129875 from the National Cancer Institute to DEB. This work was also supported by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute through grant NASA NCC 9-58 to GCB and SWL. The authors appreciate the support and advice of the Council of Science and Public Health of the American Medical Association.

No financial disclosures were reported by the authors of this paper.

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