They say history repeats itself, and that everything behaves in patterns, from wars to market cycles, to the pores and cells in the body itself– the undulation of ultradian, circadian, and iridian cycles.
Well, it’s time for another one of those black and white block text tees again. There are only two types of people in the world: early risers, and the snoozers. Confirmed via medicine, night-owls and morning-larks are indeed, two different types, “chonotypes” (Makin, 2018).
Chronobiology suggests that both duration of timing of sleep impacts other areas of health due to the control of hormones, specifically melatonin via the hypothalamus and pineal gland. Virtually every cell in the body beats via its own rhythmic clock, from blood cells that die in 120 days, to brains that sleep and clear amyloid plaques every 24 hours, to skeletons replaced every 8 years. Offsetting one’s circadian rhythms over prolonged periods of time via jet lag, illness or work have disrupted hormonal processes, imply deleterious effects on every cell in the body, inclusive of malignant cancers.
Perhaps in darkness and beauty of the night, made of cloudless thoughts and late night fries, meet not only the aspect of our eyes. Those dark underye circles do indeed run deep.
Researchers have studied how mice expressed high transcription factors of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), after exposure to jetlag. HCC is the third most common malignant cancer which reduces the circadian clock protein BMAL1. HNF4α are normal cell transcription factors that fail to act in presence of HCC (Fekry, 2018). However, rescued levels of BMAL1 in cells corresponded to lower levels of HCC, indicating that higher levels of functioning circadian proteins repress carcinogenic factors.
The novel field of chronotherapeutics rely on researchers identifying with machine learning in accordance with one’s sleep cycles through predictive and prescriptive analysis of epigenetic expression of genes and protein folding. Through predicting the potency of drug release and efficacy in response to time, machine and deep learning with not only disrupt classical fields in clinical behavioral applications, but also pharmaceutical research and insurtech.
By making the process of chronobiology both more personalized and precise, applications will indubitably disrupt medicine via lower dosages, minimized side effects, higher efficacy in treatment and reduction in health care costs.
References
Fekry, B. (2018, November 08). Body clock researchers prevent liver cancer growth in mice. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181108091241.htm