Most people have experienced jet lag at least once in their lives. That horrid sensation of being stuck awake after an exhausting flight but unable to fall asleep because our internal clocks just say no. Recent research has shown that there is another form of jet lag that science hadn’t previously termed.
The news article titled “How a Consistent Sleep Schedule Might Protect Your Heart” by Dani Blum talks about just this. A “new” type of jet lag, known as “social jet lag,” as Dr. Sabra Abbott, a sleep medicine specialist at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, says sleep experts call it, “social jet lag,” is tied to irregular sleep patterns. An example provided in the news article that sums it up quite nicely is this: “jolting awake at 7:30 on a Friday morning and then dozing until the afternoon on Saturday.” However, most, if not all, of us have experienced this. It’s so difficult not to fall into this slump, especially when we don’t get as much sleep during the week due to work, and we promise ourselves to catch up on our sleep during the weekend. Unfortunately, recent studies have proven that divulging this information in the long term can be extremely detrimental to people’s cardiovascular health. Dr. Full, a behavior epidemiologist and an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is listed as the main researcher investigating this question in the article by Dani Blum. Dr. Full and other researchers investigated the sleep data from 2,000 adults aged over 45. In their discoveries, they found that “those who slept varying amounts each night and went to bed at different times were more likely to have hardened arteries than those with more regular sleep patterns.” To summarize her studies, Dr. Full discovered that those who experience sleep duration irregularities are at higher risk, or do in fact establish subclinical atherosclerosis.
Dr. Fred Turek also investigated the correlation between circadian rhythms and an increased probability of developing heart disease. In his experiments on hamsters that carried a mutation in the CK1epsilon circadian gene, he found that these mutant hamsters have an internal clock length of 20 hours. On a normal 24-hour daily cycle, the hamsters failed to match their internal circadian rhythms and developed significant cardiovascular and renal pathology. However, if they were placed in 20-hour daily cycles that matched their internal clocks, no cardiovascular or renal disease was shown to develop. This discovery directly corresponds to the discoveries named in the New York Times articles by other experts in the field.
Thankfully, not all hope is lost. In the article by Dani Blum, Dr. Prather a psychologist and sleep specialist at the University of California, San Francisco is listed under advice on how to build a consistent sleep schedule to avert these larger health concerns. Dr. Prather mentions treating yourself, maintaining a regular bedtime routine, finding an accountability partner, getting some sun, and making the alarm as annoying as possible as all methods to get our bodies into healthy sleep cycles.
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