Morning Person or Night Owl? The mental health related to the biological clock in the study

TheLiving organisms are governed by an internal biological clock called circadian rhythm. When the Earth rotates every 24 hours, this clock aligns with the cycle of day and night. In a new study, scientists have revealed that this process is closely related to mental health. There is a larger part of the genome dedicated to body clocks than what has been done before, and these genes are linked to others that determine a person's general state of well-being.

In the newspaper, published Tuesday in Nature CommunicationsMedical researchers explain that being a "morning person" or "evening person" is a behavioral consequence of a person's underlying circadian rhythm, shaped by their genes. They found that some genes can even change a person's natural sleep time by up to 25 minutes. In this study, they examined whether these "chronotype" genes were badociated with genes related to mental health. They found that people who tend to wake up earlier are more likely to feel a greater sense of well-being and a lower risk of schizophrenia and depression.

"Our work shows that the reason people let themselves go to the lark while others are night owls is due to the differences in the way our brain reacts to external light signals and to the functioning normal of our internal clocks ", lead author and university Samuel Jones, Ph.D., researcher at Exeter, explained Tuesday. "These small differences can have potentially significant effects on our clock's ability to keep the clock running efficiently, potentially changing the risk of disease and mental health disorders."

The team examined genomic data from 250,000 US users 23andMe and 450,000 people involved in a British biobank study to find a link between the genes that govern the body clock and those that affect mental health. All indicated whether it was a "morning person" or "evening person", and since 85,000 Biobank participants had wrist activity trackers, the team could determine who was getting up early.

It was previously thought that 24 genes affected the time at which an individual wakes up. The new discoveries, however, have shown that it actually exists 351. The team explains that these genes are not only central in our biological clock, but that they are also expressed in the brain and in the retinal tissue of the eye, which could explain how the brain detects light to "reset The biological clock every day.

By badyzing chronotypic gene models and mental health genes, the team found a weak but statistically significant correlation between genetic variants increasing the risk of being a night owl and those increasing the risk of disorders. mental health, including: depression and schizophrenia. (In addition, although other studies have suggested a genetic link between the night owl and the development of obesity and type 2 diabetes, the results of this study did not support this link.)

Importantly, the results do not mean that people who do not get enough sleep are more likely to suffer from depression, although this link has been shown in other studies. This study focused on the genes that influence sleep choice, not the quality or duration of sleep, and it seems that "morning" genes tend to be badociated with genes for good mental health. As the team writes, "we show that being in the morning is badociated with better mental health, but does not affect BMI or the risk of type 2 diabetes." ".