Crossing the Body's Time Zones
By Shannon Montgomery

OTTAWA — The body's clock, when healthy, oscillates rhymically with the solar cycle. But if someone's internal rhythm is thrown off, they can become a ticking time bomb.

If the body's peripheral clocks fall out of sync with the master clock people end up feeling sick. A mild form of this is experienced as jet lag.

“If you do mess with a circadian clock, you do get sick,” says Michael Antle, a psychology professor and circadian expert at the University of Calgary.

“There’s a study that came out of Harvard a number of years ago, they were tracking nurses who did shift work. And they had a much higher incidence of breast cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and a number of other things (as compared to nurses who worked regular daytime hours). Your immune system also breaks down, so you’re more likely to get the flu or get a cold,” he says.

These circadian clocks are powered by genes that act as little gears. These clock genes are peppered throughout the body, and make up a master clock in the brain and peripheral clocks in many other tissues.

In the decade since these clock genes were shown to exist in humans, scientists have been continually amazed at how much of human existence is affected by the little clocks that keep our time.

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