Jet lag was connected to a variety of health problems. According to a new study if the normal sleep rhythm of lab were interrupted hamster, animals of less brain cells developed.
Copyright © 2010 national public radio ®. For your personal, non-commercial use only. See legal notices. For other uses, permission required.LINDA WERTH bucket, host:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR news. I am Linda Wertheimer.
STEVE INSKEEP, host:
And I'm Steve INSKEEP.
' Tis the season where travel was by bad weather all week snarled has travel in Northern Europe, Snow and ice have moved thousands of flights. The hardest hit airport London Heathrow, the jammed was passengers stranded and often angry. Heathrow, finally, almost full capacity now works, but there is a backlog of passengers, such many may still wait a few days before it at a level to make.
WERTH bucket: If the travel get long-distance Finally, wherever you go you have another problem to deal with: Jet lag. Scientists say it tends to affect women more than men. And it's even worse, you say when you travel East, as it is when you travel to the West. As Amy Standen KQED reports can mean Jet lag much more than just missed sleep.
AMY STANDEN: If you have ever questioned something profoundly unnatural about human air travel, whether you look at life a commercial pilot.
Mr PATRICK SMITH (pilot;) Columnist, Salon; (Host, AskthePilot.com): you know, there are certain moments when you fly, and maybe watch the sunset, you know twice within a period of six hours.
STANDEN: This is Patrick Smith, columnist for Salon and host AskthePilot.com.
Mr SMITH: I flew Los Angeles to Taipei, Taiwan, and recently, I was in Los Angeles at the time came when I was in Taipei landed, I think I stand for 20-something straight hours of darkness.
STANDEN: In ten years some British scientists have an experiment. Centred on two groups of female flight attendants. Both groups flying long distances, change time zones. But the second group received a much longer recovery time. Each group took a series of basic storage tests. The second group says Lance Kriegsfeld, a Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California Berkeley, not do so well.
Professor LANCE war field (Neurobiology, University of California Berkeley): they had to correct a gross reduced response time and percent on a relatively simple task.
STANDEN: And not only he said because you were tired.
Prof. war field: If you scanned your brain had smaller temporal lobe.
STANDEN: Yes, a part of your brain was actually smaller. War was so fascinated by this study, he decided to replicate it, this time with two sets of Hamster. The first group who show lights and turn off your regular schedule are held at the usual times. The second group was jet lagged behind six hours have dissected as though, says war box you had flown you from New York to Paris - only instead.
Prof. war field in this picture I show you here, it is new neurons in green and adult neurons, the it in red marked have labeled.
STANDEN: In a part of the brain, the hippocampus, a part that crucial for learning and memory, is called the Jet-lag hamsters had far fewer new brain cells you should have had.
Prof. war field: Jet lag is reduced by approximately 50 percent.
STANDEN: Well, people are not hamsters, but war box's study supports an idea, the scientists for some time had: this repeated, chronic jet lag may be bad for human health.
Now, we go all the way to understand why this can be back to 1729 to do a very interesting discovery with plants. Charles Czeisler is a sleep expert at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. CHARLES CZEISLER (sleep expert, Harvard Medical School): many people currently have been trying to figure out what the Sun to cause to bring the leaves of certain plants during the day and at night closed. And this astronomer...
STANDEN: A Frenchman called Jean Jacques D'ortous de Mairan. He put the plant in a dark closet.
Dr. CZEISLER: And lo and behold, the leaves of plants were open, although the Sun had exposed to this day.
STANDEN: Plants, it turned out, were not the Sun on all following. They were following an internal clock. This is called a circadian rhythm and we humans have also - or rather, the clock might say, has given us.
Prof. war field: you have daily rhythms in response time...
STANDEN: Again, Lance Kriegsfeld at UC Berkeley.
Prof. war field:.. Ski equipment rhythms in cognitive function and concentration, daily rhythms in coordination and balance.
STANDEN: not to sleep, to mention digestion. Trying to do all these things at the wrong time of the day, and what you just you as well. This brings us back to jet lag and Harvard's Charles Czeisler.
Dr. CZEISLER: If we upset the Apple Cart, is it as an internal temporal chaos where some of the systems in the body, think it's during the day, some think it is night, and with cross purposes instead of synchrony one another to work.
STANDEN: This phenomenon has been documented in pilots and flight attendants and in people who work the night shift. Studies link these schedules for a variety of diseases, including diabetes and digestive problems.
A way that employers could help to protect their employees would keep on regular shifts or shifts gradually change so that the workers have time to adjust. This is so far a luxury, Patrick Smith, the pilot gets rare. He says he knows the risks, but he loves his job.
Mr SMITH: Once upon a time, it took weeks to cross the ocean in a sailing ship, and now we can do it in a matter of hours, travel hundreds of miles per hour, you know about the world in almost perfect security, also. It is quite remarkable.
STANDEN: When we fly aircraft, we overcome the world literally, we developed the us to live in. Smith says this is a trade off he is willing to make.
I am for NPR news Amy Standen.
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