Whether you’re a newborn baby or in your elderly years, sleep is a central part of life. Without sleep, living organisms would never be able to sufficiently sustain, renew, and grow for more than a few hours or even days, depending on the organism. The whole process seems simple enough: Get in a comfortable position, close your eyes, and doze off and catch some Z’s. The process of sleep, however, is much more complicated than we may have thought.
Sleep is governed by circadian rhythms, or an internal clock, which derives from the Latin language circa,meaning approximately, and diem,meaning day. In the scientific world, there are hundreds of sleep labs and research projects tailored towards finding more answers over what affects our sleep cycles, but at Loyola University Chicago, Dr. Daniel Cavanaugh leads his own lab to analyze the mechanisms of circadian rhythms. He, and a handful of undergraduate and post-graduate assistants such as Dr. Dreyer use Drosophila Melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit fly, to conduct research on the effects of zeitbergers and the process of entrainment. Zeitbergers, which are time cues, such as the amount of daylight present as a certain time are useful in the process of entrainment, which is the use of external cues to synchronize our molecular endogenous clock. In one of Dr. Cavanaugh’s paper, A Peptidergic Circuit Links the Circadian Clock to Locomotor Activity, one of the main questions researched concerned the association between zeitbergers, entrainment, and circadian rhythm neurons, such as DH44 and Hugin, which govern the organisms’ desire to stay at rest or in an active state. These peptigeric neurons, in return, play into specific circuits that determine the pace of the organisms’ internal clock.
Although Dr. Cavanaugh’s research may be centered towards the finding a correlation between our metabolism functions and the circadian rhythms of living organisms, problems in the circadian clock have been linked to behavioral disorders. In an article published by BBC News in may 2018, Body clock linked to mood disorders describes a study conducted by Lancet Psychiatry which confirmed a link between behavioral disorders, such as mania, depression, and bipolar syndrome with malfunctioning circadian clock in over 91,000 patients. Some reasons that contribute to the misbalance in patient’s internal clocks were due to the increasing use of cellphones at later hours. Apart from taking consideration of the noises and vibrations cellphones are able to make, users are spending more time scrolling through social media or email inboxes at night rather than sleeping. Cell phones, in addition, emit a blue light acts as an negative entrainment for the circadian clock. Much like how sunlight governs when we wake up and sleep, this blue light acts as an unnatural zeitberger, causing the user to feel more awake than they actually are. Since patients aren’t receiving the required amount of sleep necessary, common symptoms such as anger, sadness, and confusion are much more prevalent.
While new products and mobile devices with larger screens and a longer battery life are on the rise in the consumer market, the necessity and important of sleep should not be overlooked. Sleep is responsible for a plethora of positive behavioral and physiological functions and an adequate amount of rest promotes a healthy lifestyle. By making sleep more of a priority, we are helping our circadian rhythms and ourselves to a more fruitful future.
Citation:
Gallagher, James. “Body Clock Linked to Mood Disorders.” BBC News, BBC, 16 May 2018, www.bbc.com/news/health-44113414.
King, Anna N., et al. “A Peptidergic Circuit Links the Circadian Clock to Locomotor Activity.” Current Biology, vol. 27, no. 13, 2017, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.089
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