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What mice tell us about the effects of jet lag (Includes first-hand account)

Most of the organs in the human body have their own circadian rhythms, although they’re not always keeping the same time. Circadian rhythms have not only been documented in plants and animals but also in fungi and certain types of bacteria. Although these “clocks” are hardwired, they can be altered by the environment. Researchers conducting experiments on circadian clocks continue to make new discoveries about the relationship of circadian rhythms and the environment. They’ve found that symptoms of certain diseases like single cell anemia and diabetes can vary in severity depending on the time of day. Similarly, effects of therapeutics (human growth hormone, for example, or chemotherapy) can vary depending on the time they’re delivered.

Sunlight exerts a profound influence on our circadian rhythms; shut yourself up in a cave for days or weeks at a time — as some intrepid scientists have done — and your circadian rhythms will be thrown off with unfortunate consequences to your health and your sanity. That’s why doctors and public health officials have warned about the dangers to health that can arise when we fall out of synch with our natural clocks. Artificial light, for instance, allows us to stay up late and disrupts our natural sleep patterns. People who work the night shift on average have more health problems than people who keep normal hours. Sleep during the day isn’t as restful or as beneficial as sleep at night.

Now scientists have found something new to worry about.

We all know that jet lag can set us back for days until we readjust to our new circumstances, often thousands of miles from where we started. A group of researchers at Dr. Pam Silver’s lab at Harvard’s Systems Biology department decided to see how mice would respond to jet lag. She presented her findings at the recent Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution & Design (SEED) conference in Boston, dedicated to biotech research. She explained that they hadn’t actually put mice on a 747 and flown them back and forth across the Atlantic. Instead, they’d mimicked the effects of jetlag in the laboratory by conducting a stomach-churning experiment that involved transplanting fecal matter from jetlagged humans and putting it into mice. To their astonishment, they found that apart from making the mice more sluggish, the animals also gained weight. The researchers deduced that human beings, too, are likely to put on more pounds as they acquire ever more frequent flier miles although Silver didn’t address how airline food might factor into her group’s calculations.

Related research conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel lent weight (sorry) to Silver’s findings. They found that by switching the mice’s light-dark schedules and feeding habits they could cause bacteria in the fecal matter of both humans and mice to lose their natural rhythms and even change in composition. The weight gain alone wouldn’t have been so alarming, but the mice also developed metabolic complications linked to diabetes. An examination of the microbiome of two travelers who’d flown from the U.S. to Israel confirmed that the trip had spurred the growth of bacteria implicated in obesity and diabetes in their guts.

“It’s depressing to think that we’re getting fatter when we fly,” Silver noted ruefully. But pity the experimental mice. “The mice weren’t happy,” she acknowledged, “Well, actually they died.”

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