Do you have an abnormal sleep schedule? Or, would you describe yourself as a “night owl”? If you answered yes to one of these questions, read closely- you could be subjecting yourself to potentially horrible health consequences. In the paper “Chronic circadian misalignment results in reduced longevity and large-scale changes in gene expression in Drosophila”, it is shown that chronic circadian misalignment leads to a 25 percent decrease in life expectancy for both male and female fruit flies. Chronic circadian misalignment is ever-present in the United States, with nearly 70 percent of the population able to be classified as having chronic circadian misalignment. When looking at the evidence, it is clear that circadian misalignment has a link to decreased life expectancy in humans, with controlled animal studies backing the link up. This link begs the question, could circadian misalignment have effects on humans beyond an impaired life expectancy?
“Night Owls May Have Higher Depression Risk”, an article from the New York Times, details a study done on over 30,000 women in the United States seeking to examine the relationship between circadian misalignment and depression. The study described in the article asked the women sampled to describe themselves based on how much they identify as a “morning person” versus a “night owl”. Those who described themselves as night owls were 6 percent more likely to develop depression, while those who described themselves as morning people were 12 percent less likely to develop depression. Obviously, this study has some limitations and will need to be expanded upon, but nonetheless a link like this being found demonstrates a high possibility that there are many effects of circadian misalignment beyond decreased life expectancy.
Clearly, there needs to be more of a focus upon research regarding the effects of decreased quality of sleep on humans, but in particular, it is important that circadian misalignment’s effect on humans be studied and found as soon as possible. Without the scientific evidence to back up the possible detrimental effects of circadian misalignment, we run the risk of the majority of our population impacting their physical and mental health terribly and being completely blind to what they are doing. And, from the evidence we have, it seems that this could be the case. We all either could be described as having chronic circadian misalignment or know someone who could be described as having the condition. If we care about our own health and our loved one’s health, it is imperative that we study chronic circadian misalignment and its effects on physical and mental health.
Citations:
Bakalar, Nikolas, “Night Owls May Have Higher Depression Risk”, New York Times, June 20, 2018. < https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/well/depression-sleep-chronotype-circadian-rhythm.html>
Alex C. Boomgarden, Gabriel D. Sagewalker, Aashaka C. Shah, Sarah D. Haider, Pramathini Patel
Heather E. Wheeler, Christine M. Dubowy, Daniel J. Cavanaugh, “Chronic Circadian Misalignment Results in Reduced Longevity and Large-Scale Changes in Gene Expression in Drosophila.” BMC Genomics, BioMed Central, January 7 2019. <bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-018-5401-7.>
I found your blog post very interesting, because I recently had listened to a researcher who explored a very similar topic. I think it is super relevant to study circadian rhythm misalignment, especially in college undergraduate students, because of the lack of sleep present in our population.
ReplyDeleteTypically we see college students on a normal-ish sleep schedule between Monday-Thursday, however, Friday-Sunday the same students generally go out or sleep in later. I know that sleeping in later than usual can throw off our circadian rhythm and affect our levels of cortisol leading to more mental fogginess. Your blog post really got me thinking about the education system present in the United States. Especially high schools, which start super early and then students go on to have sports/extracurriculars very late and then they're up doing homework late at night. This affects their circadian rhythm and I'm curious how this affects their quality of life.
I think there is still a lot of potential in neuroscience to study circadian rhythms further. I think eventually there will be a study so ground breaking it will cause school executives to modify their whole system of school schedules.