SfN: clocking in
It seems like everyone has discovered circadian biology. Pharmacologists (disclosure – I am a pharmacologist) have always known the power of the time of day. But experimenters in other disciplines rarely take circadian rhythms into serious account. At best they may decide to test human subjects ‘in the morning’ as a sort of lip service. But morning to an early chronotype who rises to go jogging at 5 am is not the same as morning to a late chronotype who prefers to get up at 11 am.
The new awareness is thankfully permeating loads of areas in neuroscience, though I wonder if the balance has not tipped towards exaggeration. Yesterday we heard that sleep deprivation in today’s society may be the root cause of the epidemic of obesity in western countries, particularly the US. There’s fantastic new work showing disturbances of the clocks that are present and ticking in every individual cell including those in tissues involved in metabolism. Upset that rhythm in relevant tissues, and metabolism will be disturbed. But isn’t that a long way from insisting on a causal link with obesity?
Today we heard that sleep and circadian rhythms may be an integral part of the disease process of addiction. Whether it will turn out to be fundamental remains to be seen. But it’s intriguing to learn that drugs like cocaine affect clock genes which also regulate dopamine, the key neurotransmitter in reward.