Using myCircadianClock to contribute your fasting data to research | Satchin Panda
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Dr. Satchin Panda and his colleagues at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, have created an app, MyCircadianClock, that allows users to track their daily health behaviors, including eating, sleeping, moving, and taking supplements and medications. The data gathered from the app is shared with researchers who are investigating how daily timing of these behaviors influences health and wellbeing. Users of the app gain personalized insights into their body's daily rhythms. In this clip, Dr. Satchin Panda explains the ideas behind MyCircadianClock and how it is helping the research surrounding time-restricted eating.
- Rhonda: So for people that aren't familiar, the myCircadianClock app can be found on the website myCircadianClock. And it's basically you're crowdsourcing data. You know, people that want to try this time-restricted eating out can try it out and also send their data to you and take pictures of their food so that you can gather data for your study, yeah. So that's kind of a neat thing, that people can participate. While they're trying this out, why not contribute to science?
- Satchin: Yeah. I mean what we realized is even if we get the best funded clinical trial grant from NIH or DoD or any funding source, most of the clinical studies are done with people who live within 20 to 30 miles radius of a clinical center. And so in that way, even if we foresee there will be five or six clinical trials in this country, there will be only five or six of those centers. And people who are living within that 20 to 30 miles and have time and energy to travel to a clinical center, spend almost half a day and every two to three months or two to three weeks will participate in this study and will see the benefit firsthand. Then we realized that in that way most clinical trials which are low risk like this one actually will benefit...or will sample a very small fraction of people. So that's why I came up with this idea that if we have a study that's approved by our ethics committee and we make sure that we maintain the privacy of people, we don't sell this data, we don't share this data with anybody else, and we give that assurance up front, then we may be able to recruit or enlist participants who are not living within 40 miles who don't have time to come to a clinical center, but are willing to share their data for science. And they can live anywhere in the world, they can share their data. And in this way this has been extremely useful because, again, in any clinical trial if you look at the exclusion criteria, there is such a long exclusion criteria that only 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 who even shows interest in participating, they can participate. But if we take that result and then try to disseminate to the rest of the people, those 49 or 99 people who could not qualify, then how are we expecting that this would be applicable to all of them? So it's kind of a conundrum. So that's why we thought let's try this way where the only exclusion criteria is if you are below 21 because that's NIH's mandatory exclusion criteria. And in this way not only we can see whom it will benefit, we may also see whom it will not benefit. So we can actually a priori figure out what are the limitations of TRE. And people who don't qualify, for example shift workers, they're mostly excluded from many clinical studies because of the nature of their work, they cannot come to the clinic at the right time, and this is more relevant to them. So now we have thousands of people who are shift workers and they're trying this. And from them we are also learning what they can adapt and how they can adapt this TRE into their lifestyle and whether it helps them with alertness being on the job and whether it helps them to sleep on the weekend and all that stuff. So that way this has been extremely useful to have this kind of study and sometimes we even get responses from our users that we had never thought about. So we take that response and see, "Hey, can we do this animal study and see what is going on? What is the biochemical basis for this? What is the physiological response in animals?" Maybe that's how we can address... For example, there are many cases there are many immune-related diseases and people report that this immune-related disease has improved on the time-restricted eating. And that is surprising for us. But then we went back to our animal data and we realized that, yes, we actually see systemic inflammation goes down with time-restricted eating. And that makes sense. If the systemic inflammation goes down, then many immune-related or inflammation-related diseases would also go down with time-restricted eating. So there are some examples like this where our human participants tell us their story. And if it is one or two person, we may not take it seriously. But then it's 4 or 5 or 10 or 15 people telling us the same kind of story. For example, many IBS patients who have irritable bowel syndrome who have been going to the toilet for five, six, seven, eight times every day. They do TRE, and then they immediately see that the number of times they go to the bathroom has gone down. It's a huge improvement for them. And then we might hear this story once or twice, we may not take it seriously. But then if we hear it 5, 6, 7 times, then we start thinking, "Okay, let's go back to our animal data." Because from all these animals we have collected every tissue that's imaginable and we have a freezer full of tissues. And then we go back and test what might have changed, what might be changing in the gut, what might be changing in the intestine, did the microbiome change, did the interaction between the microbiome and the host change. And that helps us to come up with newer hypotheses and do more focused studies. So this has been extremely useful for people to go sign up on the myCircadianClock website, and then download the app and share their data and also share their experience.
The body’s 24-hour cycles of biological, hormonal, and behavioral patterns. Circadian rhythms modulate a wide array of physiological processes, including the body’s production of hormones that regulate sleep, hunger, metabolism, and others, ultimately influencing body weight, performance, and susceptibility to disease. As much as 80 percent of gene expression in mammals is under circadian control, including genes in the brain, liver, and muscle.[1] Consequently, circadian rhythmicity may have profound implications for human healthspan.
- ^ Dkhissi-Benyahya, Ouria; Chang, Max; Mure, Ludovic S; Benegiamo, Giorgia; Panda, Satchidananda; Le, Hiep D., et al. (2018). Diurnal Transcriptome Atlas Of A Primate Across Major Neural And Peripheral Tissues Science 359, 6381.
A critical element of the body’s immune response. Inflammation occurs when the body is exposed to harmful stimuli, such as pathogens, damaged cells, or irritants. It is a protective response that involves immune cells, cell-signaling proteins, and pro-inflammatory factors. Acute inflammation occurs after minor injuries or infections and is characterized by local redness, swelling, or fever. Chronic inflammation occurs on the cellular level in response to toxins or other stressors and is often “invisible.” It plays a key role in the development of many chronic diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.
The collection of genomes of the microorganisms in a given niche. The human microbiome plays key roles in development, immunity, and nutrition. Microbiome dysfunction is associated with the pathology of several conditions, including obesity, depression, and autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia.
A person who works on a schedule outside the traditional 9 AM – 5 PM day. Work can involve evening or night shifts, early morning shifts, and rotating shifts. Many industries rely heavily on shift work, and millions of people work in jobs that require shift schedules.
Restricting the timing of food intake to certain hours of the day (typically within an 8- to 12-hour time window that begins with the first food or non-water drink) without an overt attempt to reduce caloric intake. TRE is a type of intermittent fasting. It may trigger some beneficial health effects, such as reduced fat mass, increased lean muscle mass, reduced inflammation, improved heart function with age, increased mitochondrial volume, ketone body production, improved repair processes, and aerobic endurance improvements. Some of these effects still need to be replicated in human trials.
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Circadian rhythm News
- Working night shifts and accumulating sleep debt increase nurses' susceptibility to illnesses, with risk escalating by nearly 50% for frequent night shift workers.
- Melatonin supplementation may heighten DNA repair in night shift workers during daytime sleep, potentially reducing cancer risk.
- Workplace design plays a crucial role in sleep health, with sedentary jobs and nontraditional schedules leading to poor sleep patterns, such as regular insomnia or compensatory 'catch-up' sleep.
- Moderate to high nighttime light exposure increases type 2 diabetes risk by up to 53 percent, comparable to genetic factors.
- Gardening improves sleep quality better than other exercises, with sleep problems decreasing as the duration of gardening increases.
