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This study evaluated the impact of atypical work hours on physiological indicators of health and chronic disease among law enforcement officers enrolled in the Buffalo Cardio-Metabolic Occupational Police Stress (BCOPS) study. Atypical work hours were defined as: work outside of a standard daytime work shift, the number of shift changes that occur over an extended period, the effect of cumulative overtime hours, and/or secondary employment. The data in this release include measures of global DNA methylation, which is an indicator of genomic instability and risk factor for several types of cancer; food logs documenting wake, sleep, and meal times during workdays and off-duty days; and survey data about psychosocial adaptive and maladaptive behaviors associated with atypical work hours.

The overall goal of this project was to understand the degradation characteristics of mRNA molecules in dried body fluid stains such that the relationship between degradation and the passage of time could be explored and used to develop a forensic tool to estimate the age of the stain (i.e., determine the time since deposition, TsD). Research has demonstrated that RNA degradation correlates with the passage of time in dried stains and have defined degradation kinetics for multiple mRNA transcripts present in dried blood, semen, and saliva stains. The current study collected detailed degradation kinetics for multiple transcripts in stains stored in real world environments with varying conditions of temperature, relative humidity, and sunlight exposure. Results suggest it may be possible to model degradation kinetics mathematically and develop an algorithm useful for estimating TsD in biological evidence recovered from crime scenes.