Exposure to LED lights could be harmful; scientists suggest a simple solution

In light of the harmful effects of radiations from LEDs, many manufacturers are taking a serious note and moving towards innovation.

Light emitting diode (LED) lights are becoming popular in India by the day as they are less expensive and more efficient. The Indian LED lighting market was worth US $3.7 billion in 2016 and the sector grew by 17.5 per cent between 2009 and 2016. But their health impacts have been largely out of public domain. 

In 2016, the American Medical Association (AMA) said that LED technology may impact human health. LED lights emit light from the short-wave, high-energy blue and violet end of the visible light spectrum. This light range controls our sleep cycle and correct exposure is important to maintain our circadian rhythm. Little wonder that many people complain of itchiness, redness in the eyes and mild headaches after continuous exposure to LED lights. The AMA says that life-long exposure of the retina and lens to blue peaks from LEDs can increase the risk of cataract and age-related macular degeneration. Studies also reveal that light emitted by LEDs can cause retinal changes, if there is high exposure for even a short period of time. 

A 2014 study published in Environmental Health Perspectives reported the adverse effects on the retina of rats due to chronic exposure to LED lights compared with other light sources that have less blue light. These researchers suggested a precautionary approach with regard to the use of blue-rich “white” LEDs for general lighting. Satya Karna, a consultant neuro-ophthalmologist with the Narayana Nethralaya, Bengaluru, says the lens and cornea have inherent ultraviolet light blocking, but with age some light, including blue peaks, can reach the retina and cause damage.

A study, which will be published in Vision Research in September this year, suggests that LED lights can cause headaches as they flicker too much. Compared to fluorescent lights which dim by around 35 per cent with every flicker, LED lights dim by 100 per cent. This can cause headaches by disrupting the movement control of the eyes, forcing the brain to work harder. 

Innovation at hand

Monto Mani, an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science’s (IISc’s) Centre for Sustainable Technology in Bengaluru, had a tryst with LED lights not so long ago. “While working with fine artwork/tools under LED lights, my students complained of intense eye strain and a diminished clarity. On one occasion, while working under LED lights for about 20 minutes, I developed an uncharacteristic pain in the upper part of the eye (ball) which nearly lasted till the next morning. We then decided to find a solution to the problem,” says Mani.

Mani and his team tested most of the commercially available LED luminaire with a spectroradiometer and found the blue peak to be unnaturally high and very unlike the natural indoor light. Finally, through some quirk of intuition, Mani tested the lights after applying Kapton tape, a polyimide film that can remain stable across a wide range of temperatures. "To everyone’s delight, it did the job so well that one would even be convinced that these tapes were developed only to cut the blue peak. So much so, that our lab has all our LED lights with Kapton, and everyone who visits our lab feels that these lights feel good," says Mani.

In light of the harmful effects of these radiations, many manufacturers are taking a serious note of blue peaks from LEDs and are moving towards warmer LEDs without the blue peaks. Most warm LED lights, 4,000 K and even 2,700 K, still emit an uneasy blue peak, but are much subdued from the cool daylight 6,000 K variants. 

Experts recommend the blocking of blue light in the 415-455 nanometres (nm) spectrum in LED lighting for commercial use. Experimental evidence indicates that exposure to blue light in the range of 470–490 nm may be less damaging to the eye compared to blue light in the 400–460 nm range. Experts say that the development of LEDs with a peak emission of around 470–490 nm may represent an important advancement in the safety of LEDs for ocular health.

As LED lights are spreading rapidly in India, it is imperative to review their health impacts. This is also because many government programmes are pushing LED lighting, including the Union government’s Prakash Path programme, launched in January 2015 for efficient domestic lighting. There is a national programme for LED-based home and street lighting, and the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) too has launched a nationwide campaign under which LED lights will replace the incandescent bulbs to promote energy-efficient lighting. 

But for the common consumer, it may be wise to replicate Mani’s innovation. As he says, “We wanted to empower the common man with a simple and cost-effective DIY (do-it-yourself) technique to render the currently available lighting, as well as those who have already purchased and installed, safer for human (and wildlife) eyes.” IISc has, in fact, implemented Mani’s application for lighting up the campus and positive feedback is pouring in.

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/environment/exposure-to-led-lights-could-be-harmful-scientists-suggest-a-simple-solution-58544

International Symposium on Biological Rhythms organized by The Indian Society of Chronobiology

International Symposium on Biological Rhythms (in conjunction with the Biennial meeting of Indian Society for Chronobiology)
	Organised by Department of Zoology, Ch. Charan Singh University, Meerut & The Indian Society for Chronobiology (InSC) 11-13 March, 2019, Meerut, India

Convener: Professor Sanjay Kumar Bhardwaj

Broad Topics of the Workshop/ Symposium

• Biological clocks, ecosystem and conservation
• Genetic aspects of circadian and circannual timing
• Comparative Clocks
• Impact of ‘modern’ lifestyle in humans
• Cognition and behaviour
• Photoperiodism and Seasonality
• Sleep and its circadian relevance

For more details: http://chronobiologyindia.org/international-symposium/

TimeSignature as a new blood test to read internal clocks

One of the challenges in human circadian studies is tracking an individual’s own internal clock, which traditionally requires hourly sampling of markers such as melatonin across the 24-hour day, which is expensive and invasive for the subject. 

A new study published in the journal PNAS, has unveiled TimeSignature – a new software tool with the ability to estimate our biological time from just two blood draws, which can be flexibly spaced 8-12 hours apart. Rosemary Braun and colleagues measured the expression of thousands of genes in the blood from their own cohort of healthy volunteers, as well as from three other independent datasets already published. They then developed a machine-learning algorithm to sift through the data and make predictions of circadian time based on genes with the strongest cyclical patterns. 

The best markers consist of a panel of ~40 genes, many of which have diverse roles, such as in metabolism or immune function. This efficient new test is accurate to within 2 hours of an individual’s circadian time and will be useful in determining when our internal clock is out of sync with the time of the external world. As the blood test becomes clinically available, more easily than ever before will researchers and physicians be able to optimize the timing of medical interventions and explore the links between circadian disruption and chronic disease. 

Determining the state of an individual’s internal physiological clock has important implications for precision medicine, from diagnosing neurological disorders to optimizing drug delivery. To be useful, such a test must be accurate, minimally burdensome to the patient, and robust to differences in patient protocols, sample collection, and assay technologies. TimeSignature is a machine-learning approach to predict physiological time based on gene expression in human blood. A powerful feature is TimeSignature’s generalizability, enabling it to be applied to samples from disparate studies and yield highly accurate results despite systematic differences between the studies. This quality is unique among expression-based predictors and addresses a major challenge in the development of reliable and clinically useful biomarker tests. 

http://www.pnas.org/content/115/39/E9247

Know Thou Biological Clock monthly Newsletter - Maiden issue

KNOW THOU BIOLOGICAL CLOCK NEWSLETTER - Volume 1, Issue 1

(Saur Ashwin 1940 / Sept-Oct 2018)
______________________________________________________________________

Welcome to the Know Thou Biological Clock Newsletter

In this issue:

1.  Purpose
2.  About Institute of Chronobiology Education & Research
3.  Cutting edge Chronobiology Research
4.  Chronobiology in Ayurved – a perspective
5.  Site of the Month
6.  Chronobiology for Students
7.  Chronobiology for Professionals
8.  Tune your Clock – Games / Meditation Techniques
9.  Support ‘Know thou Biological Clock’ Newsletter
10. How to Stop Your Subscription

____________________________________________________________

From this month I will be writing a monthly newsletter both for academic and non-academic audience. The only purpose is to reach to the larger audience on regular basis with latest news in the field. I will publish only table of content on the blog.
Those interested can request the complete newsletter by sending email id to duraphe@gmail.com.

There is an opportunity of participating in the autorhythmometric (self circadian rhythm) analysis. By volunteering for the study, not only you will help generating scientific clinical data but also become aware about your own biological clock!
 
Following links will give you detailed information about the nature of the study and you can register in any or all of them. If you pass the eligibility criteria, then we will contact you with further instructions. 

Online Chronotype assessment

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeiDNAKngayCtQ3M8Ab8wiCq-k84i6O0icb9LU-Ykn10brnJA/viewform?c=0&w=1

Online Sleep quality assessment

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdK-ngtdFMmiSP093w2lHelyyTcL2I_9_82UL4Gjs_GdjdWtw/viewform?c=0&w=1

For volunteering in Autorhythmometry data collection and analysis please register at

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfImnKLA8TM_9j_VuaeNrVHto5phPFWPDh70Rurb6RZGtfeLQ/viewform?c=0&w=1 

Chronotype Assessment

Online Chronotype assessment

Following questionnaire will assess your sleep-wake pattern and daily behavior so as to provide you the feedback about your chronotype or behavioral phenotype in scientific format.

The analysis will be useful for knowing and adjusting your disturbed biological clock. 

A disrupted biological clock is the root cause of all life style diseases whereas a normal biological clock is the key for sound health in the technology driven society.

Your response will be used for research purpose only and analysis report will be sent to you within one week on the email address provided by you.

Link for Chronotype questionnaire

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeiDNAKngayCtQ3M8Ab8wiCq-k84i6O0icb9LU-Ykn10brnJA/viewform?c=0&w=1

The dark side of light: how artificial lighting is harming the natural world

In the 1950s, Dutch physiologist Frans Verheijen began to study how lights attract animals and interfere with their behaviour. And during the 1970s, more biological observations of the impacts of light started popping up in the literature. But it took two lateral-thinking biogeographers — Catherine Rich, president of the Urban Wildlands Group in Los Angeles, California, and Travis Longcore, now at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles — to see the links between them and organize a conference in 2002, followed by a book,Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting (Island, 2006), pointing out how far the tendrils of the illuminated night extend.

For the vast majority of organisms — whether human, cockroach or wisp of plankton — the cycle of light and dark is an influential regulator of behaviour. It mediates courtship, reproduction, migration and more. “Since life evolved, Earth has changed dramatically, but there have always been light days and dark nights,” says Christopher Kyba, a physicist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. “When you change it, you have the worry that it could screw up a lot of things”.

The pace of that change is increasing. Striking images from space over the past two decades reveal the extent to which the night is disappearing. Estimates suggest that more than one-tenth of the planet’s land area experiences artificial light at night1 — and that rises to 23% if skyglow is included2. The extent of artificially lit outdoor areas spread3by 2% every year from 2012 to 2016. An unexpected driver of the trend is the widespread installation of light emitting diodes (LEDs), which are growing in popularity because they are more energy efficient than other bulbs. They tend to emit a broad-spectrum white light that includes most of the frequencies important to the natural world.

The trend has had profound impacts on some species; lights are well known to disorient migrating birds and sea turtles, for example. Scientists have also found that disappearing darkness disturbs the behaviour of crickets, moths and bats, and even increases disease transmission in birds.

The most lethal effects are perhaps on insects — vital food sources and pollinators in many ecosystems. An estimate of the effects of street lamps in Germany suggested that the light could wipe out more than 60 billion insects over a single summer4. Some insects fly straight into lamps and sizzle; some collapse after circling them for hours.

Fewer studies have examined plants, but those that have suggest that light is disrupting them, too. In a study in the United Kingdom5, scientists took a 13-year record of the timing of bud opening in trees, and matched it up with satellite imagery of night-time lighting. After controlling for urban heat, they found that artificial lighting was linked with trees bursting their buds more than a week earlier — a magnitude similar to that predicted for 2 °C of global warming. A study of soya-bean farms in Illinois6 found that the light from adjacent roads and passing cars could be delaying the maturation of crops by up to seven weeks, as well as reducing yield.

Ecosystem effects

Now, the results of some ambitious experiments are coming in. One of the largest is a field experiment in the Netherlands, where eight locations in nature reserves and dark places host several rows of street lamps. The rows are different colours — green, red, white and a control row turned off — and run from a grassland or heath field into a forest7. For six years now, scientists and volunteers have used camera traps to monitor the activity of small mammals; automatic bat detectors to record echolocation calls; mist nets for trapping birds; and nest boxes to assess the timing and success of breeding. Botanists are studying the vegetation underneath the lamps.

Artificial light can also have impacts on ecosystem services — the benefits that ecosystems provide to humans. A study published in Naturelast year found that illuminating a set of Swiss meadows stopped nocturnal insects pollinating plants13. A team led by Eva Knop of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Berne, found that insect visits to the plants dropped by nearly two-thirds under artificial light and that daytime pollination couldn’t compensate: the plants produced 13% less fruit. Knop’s team forecast that these changes had the potential to cascade to the daytime pollinator community by reducing the amount of food available. “This is a very important study, which clearly demonstrates that artificial light at night is a threat to pollination,” says Hölker

Light skies

Much of Earth remains free of direct artificial light, but skyglow — light that is scattered back to Earth by aerosols and clouds — is more widespread. It can be so faint that humans can’t see it, but researchers say it could still threaten the 30% of vertebrates and 60% of invertebrates that are nocturnal and exquisitely sensitive to light.

Skyglow “almost certainly” has an impact on biodiversity, Gaston says, because the level is well above the thresholds for triggering many biological responses. And yet, he says, “it’s actually quite hard to do the definitive study”

Bright future

It’s slow, meticulous work, but the field is coalescing as evidence accumulates, says Gaston. “The last two or three years has seen a dramatic improvement in the level of our understanding,” he says.

Nonetheless, there are improvements to make. Even measuring exposure is hard. In the field, the light an organism receives can be difficult to measure; a bird could retreat to the shadow of a nearby tree to avoid illumination, for example. So some scientists have tried strapping light meters to birds to get a better idea of dosage.

As the results seep out, one thing that both frustrates and inspires ecologists is that the remedy is at hand.

Longcore is now gathering published data on how different species, such as shearwaters and sea turtles, respond to different parts of the spectrum, and matching the results to the spectra emitted by different types of lighting. He wants to inform decisions about lighting — for example, which type of lamp to use on a bridge and which at a seaside resort.

Engineers and ecologists know that well-considered lighting can perform its task without “spraying light into the sky”, as Kyba puts it. LEDs can be tweaked to shine in certain parts of the spectrum, to dim and to switch off remotely. “My vision,” says Kyba, “is that in 30 years’ time, the streets will be nicely lit — better than today — but we’ll use one-tenth of the light.”

That would be great news for ecological systems, says Hölker, because darkness is one of the most profound forces to shape nature. “Half of the globe is always dark,” he says. “The night is half the story.”

Nature 553, 268-270 (2018)

doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-00665-7

All of us may be shift workers; which shift worker are you?

For the thousands of years that humans have existed on this planet, our circadian rhythms have been perfectly synchronized with the day:night cycle. We stayed awake during the day, working in the fields, exploring new territories, and hunting. At night we rested, with only a few individuals staying awake to protect the community from attacks by large animals and other dangers. As communities developed further, soldiers began to mount surprise attacks at night to gain an advantage over opponents. Explorers learned to navigate at night by following the position of the stars and moon. As the industrial era began, it became economically cost-effective to keep the engines of the economy running around the clock. This created a new group of workers – shift workers – who came to work in shifts to continuously man the production machinery, thereby producing goods more quickly and improving the economy of the region.

Going to work in shifts or working a few late-night hours every day was the key to building a better economy and society at large. Slowly it also became apparent that for an individual to be wealthier than others, it was important to work a few extra hours each night. However, this lifestyle of staying awake for longer periods of time – which began a few hundred years ago, particularly among shift workers – is known to disrupt circadian rhythms in physiology, metabolism, and brain function, and to increase the chance of developing many chronic diseases, even cancer. This growing connection between shift work and chronic diseases is ignored by most of us, as we typically don’t think of ourselves as shift workers (e.g., a factory worker, active duty military personnel, or first responder). But, there is a hidden epidemic of shift work-like lifestyles that have been overlooking for years.

Let’s define shift work, as well as the forms of shift work that can disrupt our circadian rhythms in ways that increase our risk of developing a chronic disease. The term shift work is defined differently in different countries and by different agencies. Some say that any work done outside 9 am to 5 pm (i.e., regular working hours) is shift work. According to the International Labor Organization, shift work is defined as staying awake 3 or more hours between 10 pm and 5 am for at least 50 days in a year. Why only 50 days in a year? Because once we disrupt our sleep for 3 or more hours and work under artificial light, circadian rhythms of different hormones, brain chemicals, and metabolites are disrupted, and even if we go back to doing regular shift work, our internal clocks will stay de-synchronized for up to a week. So, staying up late one or two days each week can offset circadian rhythms enough that our circadian clocks are playing catch up all the time.

This means that there are many ways we can disrupt our circadian rhythms; we don’t have to be working the night shift. Many of us don’t realize that if we stay up late a couple days a week, then we are living the life of a shift worker and that this lifestyle will cause long-lasting harm to our brain and body. There are at least 5 lifestyles that terribly disrupt circadian rhythms.

Shiftwork – Nearly 20% of the workforce in industrial countries are card-carrying shift workers. They include people working in the military, airline industry, transportation, food services, police, first responders, etc. They continuously work in these roles for years. In some professions (e.g., military, police, and firefighters) there is enough physical activity to counteract some of the adverse effects of shift work. Nevertheless, they cannot overcome the psychological stress of not sleeping enough or working in shifts. In the airline industry, safety and security concerns have led to better implementation of rest time between shifts, allowing employees to recover from circadian disruption, but some individuals may need more recovery time than others. The good news is that growing awareness about the adverse health impacts of shiftwork is leading to improvements in work schedule, downtime, extra compensation, etc. in many sectors of shiftwork.

Second-hand shift workers are the spouses or loved ones of shift workers who may also stay awake late into the night, or whose sleep and eating schedules are disrupted because they want to interact with their shift-working loved one. We became aware of the prevalence of this group while studying human eating and sleeping behavior for several weeks. In this study, we implemented strict criteria for excluding traditional shift workers. But when we analyzed the sleep:activity records of some participants, we found that their sleep:wake patterns were indistinguishable from a night shift worker. At first, we thought that these people forgot to identify themselves as shift workers. But after follow-up discussions, we realized that they were instead spouses of shift workers who had modified their daily lifestyle to be in sync with their partner.

Chronic jetlag – After traveling three time zones or more (east coast to west coast in the US), it can take up to a week for your circadian rhythms to be back to normal. As such, individuals that fly frequently and accumulate 100,000+ miles in a year (United 1K, Global Services, Oneworld emerald or Oneworld sapphire, Gold or Platinum medallions in Delta, MVP Gold 75K in Alaska air) are literally card-carrying chronic jet laggers and experience chronic circadian disruption. I have experienced this first hand. For ~8–9 months each year I fly at least twice a month, and that is enough to disrupt my rhythms. Being mindful of my patterns of sleep, physical activity, and food intake, I actively try to minimize the effects of frequent travel on my circadian rhythms, and therefore rarely fall sick. I also deliberately stop traveling 3 months each year so my body has enough time to rest and work efficiently.

Digital jetlag is when your body is in one-time zone but your mind is in another zone. How is that possible? This has been feasible only recently due to the widespread use of digital devices and connectivity that make it possible to work in real time with people living in a different time zone or to live-stream video content being generated across the globe. There is a completely new group of workers who did not exist a few decades ago. Those who live in one time zone but their working hours are tied to another time zone. This includes stockbrokers, financial analysts, call center workers, and a large number of IT professionals. Even if they are not classified as shift workers, the pressure to coordinate work with one or more colleagues working in a different time-zone disrupts their circadian rhythms. Similarly, entertainment and social network also disrupt our normal rhythms. We can now play video games or watch live games/concerts with individuals that are three or more time zones away.

Social Jetlag. Finally, the most unrecognized and most prevalent type of circadian disruption is social jetlag, which could affect > 50% of us. This type of jetlag happens when we stay awake past mid-night or have to wake up very early (e.g., 2 or 3 am) to finish an assignment, go clubbing, prepare for exams, etc., for one or more days in a week and then try to re-establish a normal routine on rest of the week. Nearly 70% of high school students, college students, young adults, and new mothers/dads stay up past midnight at least 1 day a week for an entire year, and therefore meet the definition of shift work or jet-lag. It’s as if they are in one time-zone on normal days, and a different time zone on the day they stay awake late into the night. This is no different from the schedule of someone doing night-shift work or traveling to a different time-zone. So, chronic diseases that are more prevalent among traditional shift workers may also affect us when we experience social jetlag.

As you can see, almost all of us fall into at least one of these categories (for at least some phases of our life), and these periods of circadian rhythm disruption adversely affect our health. These circadian-disruptive lifestyles increase our risk for disease in another way. To cope, we often develop bad habits (e.g., dependencies on coffee, tea, alcohol, energy drinks, or drugs to stay alert or to fall asleep). These may appear to be quick fixes, but they slowly become part of our daily routine. Some of these bad habits stay with us for the rest of our lives and contribute in their own ways to disease susceptibility.

http://blog.mycircadianclock.org/all-of-us-may-be-shift-workers-which-shift-worker-are-you/

Chronobiology outreach programs for all age groups

Training courses in Chronobiology

Chronobiology though sound only related to life sciences, it is truly an interdisciplinary branch of science dealing with every aspect of not only humans but ecosystem as a whole. Rhythmic geophysical cycles has effect on every living being and evolutionary forces have installed a powerful endogenous clock in all species for anticipation of daily environmental changes.

Chronobiological understanding of daily rhythmic cycles will help individual to modify the lifestyle and live in synchronization with external clock. 

We are planning short term training courses for school / college students and professionals along with extensive advanced course for post graduate students. The details are as follows:

Introductory Course in Chronobiology

Duration: 1 month   Fees Rs. 2000-00  (Every month starting from May 2018)

Registration link: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfcxfyzNaEY7BDoV5IOug4-gI3FYjobHy0NIGlfsSkDwMO_HA/viewform?c=0&w=1

Basic Course in Chronobiology

Duration: 4 months   Fees Rs. 5000-00 (Twice a year July - Oct  &  Jan - Apr)

Registration link: Will be open in June 2018

Advanced Course in Chronobiology

Duration 10 months   Fees Rs. 10000-00 (Once in a year  Aug - May)

Registration link: Will be open in July 2018

Introductory Course in Chronobiology

We are initiating an introductory course in collaboration with Late Prin. B. V. Bhide Foundation. This course will give opportunity for all irrespective of the educational background to understand the basics of biological clock and its effect on us and environment.

The routine certificate course will start in August 2018 for those who are keen in pursuing the subject for further studies.

The details of the course are as follows:

Lecture schedule: Each Saturday & Sunday   5 pm – 6.30 pm 

Duration: 1st - 31st May 2018 

Fees: Rs. 2000-00

Venue: Tilak College of Education, Pune 30

Week No.	Lecture No.	Topics
1	1	Introduction to Chronobiology History and Overview
1	2	Project assignment and orientation
2	3	Properties & Types of Biological rhythms
2	4	Statistical  analysis of rhythmic data
3	5	Human circadian organization Ayurvedic & Modern perspective
3	6	Sleep & Circadian research
4	7	Statistical tools – hands on activities
4	8	Open book examination/Valedictory

Register for the course by filling the google form available by clicking the link below:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfcxfyzNaEY7BDoV5IOug4-gI3FYjobHy0NIGlfsSkDwMO_HA/viewform?c=0&w=1

World Sleep day 2018

Every year friday before spring vernal equinox is celebrated as world sleep day. 

It is aimed to celebrate the benefits of good and healthy sleep and to draw society's attention to the burden of sleep problems and their medicine, education and social aspects to promote the prevention and management of sleep disorders.

Slogan for 2018 world Sleep Day: Join the Sleep world, Preserve Your Rhythms to Enjoy Life

The behavioral trait of preference to schedule the daily activities for morning or evening hours forms a continuum, with the anchorage ends of “early birds” and “night owls,” and is called chronotype. Genetic effects contribute to the chronotype by about half and the other half is accounted for non-shared environmental effects. However, no “chronotype gene” has been identified yet. There is a growing body of literature on health hazards that has been attributed to the chronotype itself, being independent of a number of factors. So far, without any exception, of those health hazards that do differ between the chronotypes, all have been more common among the “night owls” than among the “early birds,” such as mood disorders, anxiety disorders, substance use disorders, personality disorders, insomnia, sleep apnea, arterial hypertension, bronchial asthma, type 2 diabetes, and infertility. Alarmingly, current data suggest that “night owls” tend to die younger than “early birds”.

Curr Sleep Medicine Rep (2015) 1:205–211 DOI 10.1007/s40675-015-0022-z

Why do we have circadian rhythms

National Science Day 2018  
Theme of the year 2018 is "Science and Technology for a sustainable future."

''Sustainable future with Sustainable lifestyle and Sustainable lifestyle with Synchronized Biological clock''

Why have 24-hour rhythms?

Multitasking can either increase or decrease your productivity, depending on the tasks you are trying to combine. Driving while talking on the phone, watching TV while working on a project, running a marathon while checking your Instagram – we may have done this, but we don’t do it on a regular basis because it is not the safest nor the most productive way to accomplish a task. But there are some acts that truly go together – listening to music while working on an assignment, eating dinner while talking to friends or family across the table. In fact, some acts go hand in hand so well that we feel happy and productive doing them together.  Overall, we tend to combine compatible acts, and attempt to keep incompatible acts apart.

Similarly, our bodies do a lot of different functions on a daily basis. These include eating or drinking, actively looking for food or companionship, and sleeping. Underlying these rhythms in nutrition, physical activity, and sleep are numerous physiological functions. For example, the sleep hormone melatonin helps us fall asleep, and when we are asleep our muscles are less responsive to brain signals, so we don’t act out our dreams by walking or running around – that would be dangerous. When we are awake, levels of the stress hormone cortisol are slightly higher than when we are asleep. High cortisol levels make us more alert and active. When we play a sport, we need our muscles to respond quickly and robustly to signals from our brain so that we can coordinate our movements. We don’t want sleep hormones circulating during this time. Overall, our body tries to coordinate physiology (e.g., levels of hormones, metabolism, and brain function) so that body functions necessary for a particular behavior, such as playing sports, occur together. In contrast, our bodies try to segregate body functions necessary for contradictory behaviors, such as playing sports and sleep.  Our circadian rhythms play important roles in these processes. Circadian clocks in different organs and brain regions set in motion programs to ensure that hormones, nutrition, brain function, muscle function, etc. that are necessary for sleep occur at night, whereas those supporting physical activity and alertness occur during the day.

If we didn’t have circadian rhythms, our daily life would be very unpredictable. If you have ever taken care of a new born baby you would know how is life without a circadian clock. Newborn babies are still developing a fully functional circadian clock. So, they don’t have a strong rhythm to the sleep/wake cycle. As a result, they feel hungry every 2–4 hours and cry in hunger. After feeding they go back to sleep until they feel hungry again in a few hours. Imagine if we all were like babies. It would be hard to get together with friends or work in an office, as at any given time about half would be sleepy and the other half would be awake or hungry.

Another reason we have circadian rhythms is to conserve energy. Imagine a house in which the kitchen stove is always burning, the dishwasher is always running, the washer and dryers never stop, the vacuum cleaner and lawnmowers work around the clock. What a waste of energy. It makes more sense to turn these devices on only when they are needed. That is exactly what happens in our body. It is not worth producing digestive juices throughout the 24-hour day when we eat only a few times a day at predictable times. There is also no benefit to having our muscles at top performance levels when we sleep. Besides, when an organ or brain region does work, waste products are generated. These waste products can damage our tissues, and therefore must be neutralized and removed from our body. So, having circadian rhythms reduces the overall energy usage and helps to reduce the accumulation of tissue waste and tissue damage.

One more reason for having a circadian clock is to efficiently repair and rejuvenate our body. Circadian clocks in different parts of the body and brain work together to repair damaged cells and to make new cells. At night when we go to sleep, our brain is detoxified, our gut and skin generate new cells to replace damaged ones, new blood cells exit the bone marrow and enter the circulation, and toxic products from muscle and liver are collected in urine. Numerous such repair and rejuvenation processes occur in different tissues at specific times. Just as a highway cannot be efficiently repaired if traffic is allowed to flow, our circadian rhythms take advantage of downtime to activate daily rejuvenation processes.

Circadian rhythms are essentially timing programs ingrained in our body and mind to ensure that basic functions are efficiently performed on a daily basis. They help us sleep better, work better, and cleanse our body better by timing the production of certain hormones, and the activation of certain cell functions in different parts of our body and brain.

http://blog.mycircadianclock.org/why-do-we-have-circadian-rhythms/

Ayurvedic understanding and modern Chronobiology

With the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology having been announced, there is a lot to rejoice, not just for the scientific community but for the common man also, because it helps us to develop a better understanding of how our body works. This year’s prize is shared among American scientists Jeffrey C Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W Young for their work on “molecular mechanisms controlling circadian rhythms”. This would be great news for researchers and students of Ayurveda, the Indian science of health, as it will directly resonate with what they know about the relation between the human system and the nature. Such findings give researchers of Ayurveda concrete modern frameworks to communicate their knowledge on global platforms. With chronobiology gaining prominence after these laureates’ work, it would be relevant at this time to draw parallels with what is mentioned in Ayurveda and the prize winning research. According to news articles and the summary provided in the official Nobel Prize website, some of the key findings of the research are as follows:

1. The gene that controls the daily biological/circadian rhythm responds to light by degradation of the protein accumulated in the cell during nights.
2. Hence, our inner clock adapts our physiology to the dramatically different phases of the day with great precision.
3. There are also indications that chronic misalignment between our lifestyle and the rhythm dictated by our inner time-keeper is associated with increased risk for various diseases.

Circadian Rhythm And Well-being

This Nobel Prize winning research work is based on the circadian rhythm, which refers to biochemical oscillators that respond to solar cycles. To quote Sir Paul Nurse, 2001 Laureate, “All plant and also animal behaviour is determined by the light-dark cycle. We on this planet are slaves to the sun”. Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash discovered that PER, the protein encoded by period, accumulated during the night and was degraded during the day. Thus, PER protein levels oscillate over a 24-hour cycle, in synchrony with the circadian rhythm.

It is striking to note how Ayurveda establishes the link between the revolution-rotation of the earth and human health. According to Ayurveda, the different tridoshas (the three humors: Vata, Pitta and Kapha, in the body that need to be balanced for perfect health), are predominant during different times of the day. For instance, Pitta Dosha which controls digestion, metabolism and energy production is high between 10am and 2pm. Pitta ensures the availability of energy to perform various activities. This very well correlates with the high alertness, best co-ordination and fastest reaction times shown in the illustration below. Research works on circadian rhythm from the perspective of Ayurveda correlate the time of the day and hormonal activity, very similar to the degeneration of protein with the day as discovered by the laureates. For example, Kapha dosha is predominant in early phase of the day. Most of the hormones are at the peak level in the morning and they decline with the time and are lowest at the evening time.

Time Of Drug Administration

According to The Guardian’s article, “There is some evidence that treatment of disease can be influenced by circadian rhythms too. People have reported that whenyou have surgery or when you have a drug can actually influence things. It’s still not clear, but there will almost certainly be some implications for the treatment of disease too.” This means that the time of the day when a medicine is had most likely influences its impact on the human body.

Ayurveda talks of bhaishajya kaala, which refers to the appropriate time for administering the aushada (medicine). Few research works on Ayurveda, published by Indian researchers, detail the impact of time of drug administration on the treatment of disease. Their research work mentions, “Kapha kaala is one-third part of the day, and later half of this one-third part is Kapha udreka gata kaala (past the excessive kapha). The medicine is administered in the empty stomach when the koshtha (digestive tract) is devoid of Kapha utklesha (aggravated kapha). Because if there is Kapha utklesha, the medicine will not come in contact with agni (digestive fire), and will not be digested properly and effect will be either delayed or reduced. Hence, medicine is administered only after the Kapha udreka is over”.

Lifestyle And Rhythm Dissonance

The key implication of the laureates’ work is that misalignment with the rhythm can cause health issues. It is fascinating to note how Ayurvedic texts address such misalignments caused by dissonance in a systematic manner and prescribe numerous preventive regimes. Dinacharya, an ayurvedic concept, maps the light and dark cycle of the day to human activities. Several Ayurvedic texts detail the list of activities that one can perform during different times in the day for robust health. Ayurveda in fact goes beyond the daily cycles, and elucidates the role of the changing seasons as well.

The first few chapters of the various samhitas (of Ayurveda) are dedicated to ritucharya, which talk about the relationship between human health and seasonal changes (which are caused by the revolution of the earth and tilt of the earth’s axis). Charaka samhita, for instance says, “Tasya shitadiya ahaarbalam varnascha vardhate. Tasyartusatmayam vaditam chestaharvyapasrayam,” meaning ‘knowing the suitable diet and regimen for every season and practicing accordingly enhances the health of a person’.

Hall, Rosbash and Young’s work furthers the research on the chronobiology by identifying specific genes at work. According to the Independent, “The work didn’t reveal any tips for regulating our own circadian rhythm or improving sleep, said experts. But it was a reminder of the importance of doing so …”. Their phenomenal research work has left us at an important juncture, where solutions need to be explored. Interdisciplinary and integrative research that blends insights from Ayurveda and modern medicine could probably offer solutions.

Circadian clock

Ayurvedic clock

https://swarajyamag.com/science/this-years-nobel-prize-in-medicine-puts-fresh-focus-on-ayurveda