What if a pill could help adjust your internal body clock to night shifts or jet lag the way it works during the day to eliminate various health risks, including cancer? This may be possible, says a team of Australian researchers, with the administration of glucocorticoid tablets, a class of hormones used as powerful anti-inflammatory compounds to treat various diseases.
"This new scientific discovery opens the door to innovative therapies that could act on the different parts of the circadian system so that these rhythms can be adjusted to inverted sleep schedules," said Diane B Boivin, director of the centre for study and treatment of circadian rhythms at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute.
For this, the team studied the rhythmic expression of clock genes in white blood cells to see how they adjusted in response to glucocorticoids. The researchers analysed 16 healthy volunteers who were studied in temporal isolation chambers. The results showed, for the first time, that the peripheral biological clocks located in white blood cells can be synchronised through the administration of glucocorticoid tablets.
