Thursday, January 14, 2010

More on Sleep - circadian rhythms


I occasionally have stuff here on sleep. Sufficient sleep in the dark is a "good thing".

I also occasionally point to stuff from the blog Open Water Chicago where they take something of a paleo approach to diet and training....anyway these two come together today:

Open Water Chicago has a sister blog: Neuroscene


Body Clocks: The Consequences of Disrupting Our Circadian Rhythms

We’ve all heard about our “sleep clocks.” But were you aware that we have numerous such clocks all over our bodies – and that disruption of these clocks can have serious health and emotional consequences?

In this podcast, we speak with Dr. Ilia Karatsoreos of Rockefeller University who recently conducted a study on how the disruption of circadian rhythms can adversely affect our metabolism as well as our higher level cognitive functioning. Be sure to listen in as we discuss the science of body clocks and how important is to keep them “in sync.”

2 comments:

dr. m.c. said...

hi chris, interesting stuff eh?

but,

so far i think this research has mainly been carried out on rats rather than people, no?

so i'm not sure yet about generalizability or how that balances with other factors, like location?

Also, in a weirdness, while the Rockerfeller group was first reported in Oct 09 it seems very similar work preceded it (pointed to in the first link above) - work that came out in Aug 09, so done must be a year earlier.

Someone has better publicists, even in academia.sigh.

which means there's probably other labs flashing lights on and off on mice too. rather than us

Doug McGuff, MD said...

Chris,

My shifts in the ER are....7am-4pm, 11am-7pm, 2pm-11pm, 4pm-1am,7pm-1am 10pm-7am. They rotate throughout the month. I can tell you from experience, that this is devastating to any sense of well-being. The 4pm-1am shift is the busiest, and has a bigger impact on my recovery from exercise than any other factor.

Doug McGuff