Seeing the dark path above? Feeling like Dracula? If your answers to these questions were yes, then you are in the right place.
In a little more than a week, time will change by the human hand again spreading light and with it the discomfort of part of the population. If you are still unsure of what I am saying, then you are probably somewhere where daylight savings time is not a big polemic theme, or it is just not used in your place of living. If you are part of those who dislike these changes you will find refuge in the article “Daylight savings ends in November. Why is it still around and what's the status of the Sunshine Protection Act?” by Anthony Robledo and Jennifer Sangalang1 published in USA Today as it discusses a new bill to end the DST. The reintroduced bill proposes that the DST, an abbreviation for daylight savings time, should be the time all around the year for everyone. However, the Sunshine Protection Act, as the bill is called has much more behind it. I plan to explore the biological background of the scientific argument with the hammer of circadian rhythm.
First, a brief introduction to what circadian rhythm is. According to the chapter entitled “Circadian Desynchrony and Health” by Dr. Summa and Dr. Turek2, the circadian rhythm is the internal biological clock that regulates physiological processes and behaviors in the body of mammals while synchronizing to the light-dark cycle through entrainment. Entrainment means that a biological system, a human for example, will be synchronized to an environmental rhythm such as the light and dark cycle. The circadian rhythm in a human’s light-dark cycle is approximately 24 hours. One may think that the influences of it are small in the human body after all we have all had different sleep times, we have traveled to different time zones, or we did not sleep to study for that chemistry exam. However, one would be wrong to assume so, as in this same chapter Dr. Summa and Dr. Turek discuss how it affects cardiovascular disease, cancer, and gastrointestinal diseases.
After this brief introduction one must be thinking but how does it relate to DST? The fastening of an hour forward basically makes humans lose one hour of natural light in the mornings while having greater exposure to it during the night period. This would lead to chronic sleep loss due to our body entrainment change being slow and gradual in this adaptation which results in humans falling asleep later in the day. The AASM3 (American Association of Sleep Medicine), argues for the end of DST and no more time changes using the chronic sleep loss argument. But the argument does not stop there, there is also a found increase of 6% in the chances that someone will get into a fatal car crash during the DST according to a study by Dr. Josef Fritz and colleagues4. Therefore, circadian rhythms prove themselves to be one of the underlying biological mechanisms surrounding what is summarized as DST.
However, if you are still not convinced by the data previously mentioned, then please remember how it felt after you took the COVID-19 vaccine and were overtaken by the hope of taking your mask freely when visiting your family. Now what if I told you that your immune system reaction to the vaccine was controlled by the time of the day that you took the vaccine? That is what Dr. Cheng Wang, Dr. Lydia Kay Lutes, Dr. Coline Barnoud, and Dr. Christoph Scheiermann found in their paper titled “The circadian immune system.”5 This paper is a breakthrough in the circadian rhythm research area, especially with the measurements used.
In the end, what I want to leave as the message from this blog is the impact of circadian rhythms on decisions that would be considered “no-brainers”. Nevertheless, I ask you to reconsider such classification look further into what goes on behind these brief abbreviations, and take the time to think of the impacts it may have overall. Thus, remember to sleep on time, and independently from DST enjoy the daylight when waking up.
References:
1. USA Today. Anthony Robledo and Jennifer Sangalang, 1 Sep. 2023. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/09/01/when-does-daylight-saving-time-end-and-why-still-around/70743169007/
2. Summa, K.C., & Turek, F. W. (2014). Circadian desynchrony and health. Atlas of Clinical Sleep Medicine. https://doi.oeg/10.1016/b978-0-323-65403-6.00029-9
- Josef Fritz, Trang VoPham, Kenneth P. Wright, Céline Vetter. A Chronobiological Evaluation of the Acute Effects of Daylight Saving Time on Traffic Accident Risk. Current Biology, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.12.045
5. Wang, C., Lutes, L. K., Barnoud, C., & Scheiermann, C. (2022). The circadian immune system. Science Immunology, 7(72), eabm2465–eabm2465. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciimmunol.abm2465
No comments:
Post a Comment