Swiss researchers’ hormone find could improve elderly people’s sleep

Are you a lark or an owl? Hormones may play a key role

Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The University of Zurich’s Pharmacology and Toxicology laboratory is actively seeking “individuals suitable” for the next stage of its Chronobiology and Sleep Research project, already underway, using a method the laboratory has developed to text sleep patterns in real time.

Previous studies have been limited by the difficulty of observing normal sleep patterns under laboratory conditions.

“One major obstacle in studying the human circadian oscillator is the difficulty of measuring properties such as period length. So far, this task has been achieved in only a few heroic studies employing extensive subject observation under controlled conditions”, researchers note on their web page.

Journal report shows hormonal basis for changing sleep patterns

The work continues with research reported 11 April in the journal PNAS, a new study from researchers at universities in Basel and Zurich who have found a hormonal basis for the changing sleep patterns that people undergo during old age.

An article “Serum factors in older individuals change cellular clock properties“, paves the way for a possible drug-based remedy to counteract these changes in sleep schedules.

Each person’s daily circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle of sleep and consciousness, functions via a system of cell-autonomous clocks that can be found in nearly every cell of the body, all of which are controlled by the brain.

As the cells’ molecular make-up does not alter during the aging process, Lucia Pagani from Basel, Steven A Brown from Zurich and their group looked into a possible hormonal influence on the changes.

They found, in comparing the circadian rhythms of skin cells taken from both young and old patients, that when cultured in human serum also taken from young and old, the young skin cells behaved like the older cells when they were cultured in the older serum.

“I can say whether you are a ‘lark’ or an ‘owl’ simply by looking at your skin cells,” researcher Brown told MSN, but “what is new here is that blood serum from older individuals makes cells from younger people ‘behave’ as if they were old.”

Sleep of elderly persons often disturbed

This sheds new light on the sleep patterns of older people, where the “consolidation of sleep and wake is often disturbed”, and opens up possibilities for people to re-gain the sleep patterns of their earlier days using hormone-altering drugs.

The University of Zurich’s Pharmacology and Toxicology laboratory is actively seeking “individuals suitable” for the next stage of its Chronobiology and Sleep Research project, already underway, using a method the laboratory has developed to text sleep patterns in real time. Previous studies have been limited by the difficulty of observing normal sleep patterns under laboratory conditions.

“One major obstacle in studying the human circadian oscillator is the difficulty of measuring properties such as period length. So far, this task has been achieved in only a few heroic studies employing extensive subject observation under controlled conditions.”

Links to other sites: MSNBC, Web MD, PNAS Journal