Life in Circadia
The ticking of the bodyclock can help us fight cancer, safeguard our hearts, time our meals, and enhance our intelligence
While chronotherapy sounds like it might be a kind of technique for righting a circadian system that’s out of kilter, in fact it relies on a functioning rhythm for precision-guided medical interventions. Using chronotherapy, the ticking of the bodyclock can help us fight cancer, safeguard our hearts, time our meals, and even make better use of our brain’s intelligence.
Liver and pancreas clocks are easily reset by eating late at night, which puts them out of sync with the rest of the bod
When people eat at a time when the liver has packed it in for the night, those sugars and fats are not properly metabolised. Twenty percent of liver proteins are created in a strictly circadian fashion, so that the liver produces twice the average number overall in peak times, and half at the lowest times. If one stifles those clock genes in the liver, fat levels in that organ spike, even with a low-fat diet.
The most substantial body of research in chronotherapy comes from the field of cancer treatment, where it has been noticed for more than 30 years that chemotherapy is more effective – and less arduous – when delivered at certain times of day. That’s because tumours grow on a rhythmic schedule, and that schedule does not match the growth timetable of healthy tissues that might fall victim to whole-body anti-cancer drugs. Organs that oncologists normally try to isolate in space can also be separated by time differences.
That trial, of 60 patients with advanced colorectal cancer, found that three cytotoxic drugs could be safely delivered at double the dose if a timed schedule was followed. That led to more than double the efficacy: two out of three tumours shrank to operable size in the experimental condition, whereas only one in four showed the same progress when the drug was delivered normally.
Lévi came to the study of timed pharmaceutical intervention through a study of traditional Chinese medicine, the core tenets of which are rooted in chronology – physiological differences between day and night, as well as the seasonal flare-ups of various types of ailments. Without getting too bogged down in arcane philosophy, suffice it to say that the person is understood to be tied closely with the rest of the world and, indeed, the universe. This includes a bodily response to the ebb and flow of sunlight: the climax of yang at noon, and the maximal yin at midnight.
Fatigue, risk of infection and depression could be alleviated if chemo could only be delivered when the bone marrow is not producing blood cells
by Jessa Gamble
soul food
