by Liza Cameron Wasser

Created on: March 04, 2009

Daylight saving time has been shown to have both positive and negative effects on a person's health.

Many people suffer from a disturbance in their sleep patterns due to daylight saving time. Finnish researchers conducted a study that found that people who like to stay up late are more bothered by the time change than people who prefer to get up early.

Babies and toddlers are prone to symptoms resembling jet lag in the days following the beginning and end of daylight saving time. Some adults have complained of similar symptoms due to the disruption of their normal circadian rhythms.

One positive health effect of daylight saving time is that people who work on fixed schedules often use the extra daylight hours after work for outdoor recreation, thereby getting more exercise. People have more time for a nice long walk or a neighborhood softball game.

An extra hour of sun can be good or bad for your health, depending on how you look at it. The sun helps you synthesize vitamin D, but too much sun exposure can cause sunburn and be a contributing factor in skin cancers. Taking advantage of the extra light should be balanced with taking care of your skin.

It is a fact that people drive more safely during daylight hours. When adjusting the clocks allows daylight to correspond to when the majority of drivers are on the road, there is a statistically significant reduction in automobile fatalities and accidents involving pedestrians. Unfortunately, there is a spike in automobile accidents in the week following the end of daylight saving time due to the sudden change of sunset arriving an hour earlier. Drivers adjust to driving at night over the winter months so that the number of automobile accidents in the last few days of standard time is significantly lower than that of the number of accidents in the first few days of standard time.

There is also similar phenomenon in the occurrence of heart attacks. Swedish researchers found that there is a spike in the number of heart attacks in the week following the onset of daylight saving time and a corresponding drop in the number of heart attacks in the week after daylight saving time ends. Previously, it was known that people were at a higher risk of heart attacks on Monday. This was originally thought to be due to returning to the stress of the workweek. Now scientists are trying to determine if the change in sleep cycles is the culprit.

Daylight saving time is a controversial subject and its effect on our health is of the utmost importance.

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