Our bodies are teeming with circadian clocks in almost every cell in our bodies, with a ‘master clock’ in our brains, but when they get out of sync it can have disastrous impacts, new research warns
Researchers in the US have discovered that slowing down ageing and boosting physical and mental health might be within our grasp, if we harness the power of our bodies’ internal clocks.
In the 1990s scientists discovered that we each have an internal molecular clock that regulates the body’s functions such as sleep, hunger and metabolism on a daily cycle – this is called our circadian rhythm. What fewer people know is that we actually have millions of these circadian clocks inside us – in almost every cell and tissue in our bodies, with a ‘master clock’, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, in the brain.
What researchers have now discovered is that as we get older all our circadian clocks start to get out of time with each other. This means that systems vital for regulating the functioning of our bodies and brains can fall out of sync with each other as we grow older, according to research by Northwestern University in the US.
The scientists warned that serious diseases such as cardiovascular disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes and cancer may be linked to this ‘circadian clock de-syncing’, according to the research. And biologists at Cleveland State University in the US have found that the damage could extend to our brains and DNA too. Our body’s systems for repairing broken DNA, and also a vital maintenance process called autophagy, which clears our brain of damaged cells, also depends on our circadian clock, they said in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience.