In a recent article published in Nature translational psychiatryScientists hypothesize that CRD is a common psychopathological factor in a wide range of psychiatric disorders, and that studying its molecular basis may be key to unlocking better treatments and cures. .

“Circadian rhythms play a fundamental role in all biological systems at all scales, from molecules to populations,” said senior author Pierre Bardy, UCI Distinguished Professor of Computer Science. increase. “In our analysis, circadian rhythm disruption was found to be a broadly overlapping factor in the gamut of mental health disorders.”

Lead author Amal Alachkar, a neuroscientist and professor of pharmacy at the UCI, noted the difficulty of testing the team’s hypothesis at the molecular level, but the researchers found that most papers were peer-reviewed. It said it had found ample evidence of a link through a thorough search of the published literature. A prevalent mental health disorder.

“Clear indications of circadian rhythm disturbances, sleep-related problems, were present in each disorder,” Alachkar said. “While our focus has been on widely known conditions such as autism, ADHD and bipolar disorder, the CRD psychopathological factor hypothesis is not the same as obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia nervosa. I argue that it can be generalized to other mental health problems such as dysentery, food addiction, and Parkinson’s disease.”

Circadian rhythms regulate our body’s physiological activities and biological processes on a daily basis. Synchronized with the 24-hour light-dark cycle, your circadian rhythm affects when you normally need sleep and when you’re awake. It also manages other functions, such as producing and releasing hormones, maintaining body temperature, and consolidating memory. Effective, uninterrupted operation of this natural timekeeping system is necessary for the survival of all organisms, according to the paper’s authors.

Since circadian rhythms are inherently sensitive to light and dark cues, exposure to light at night can easily disrupt them, and the level of disruption appears to be gender-dependent and change with age. Hormonal response to CRD. Both mother and fetus can experience clinical effects from CRD and chronic stress.

“An interesting question we investigated is the interaction between circadian rhythms, psychiatric disorders and sex,” said Baldi, director of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics at UCI. “For example, Tourette’s syndrome affects mostly men, and Alzheimer’s disease is about two-thirds to one-third more common in women.”

Age is also an important factor, according to scientists, and CRD may not only lead to the development of aging-related psychiatric disorders in older adults, but also affect neurodevelopment during childhood.

Baldi said an important open question centers on the causal relationship between CRD and mental health disorders: is CRD a key role in the origin and development of these diseases, or is it self-reinforcing in disease progression? Is it a symptom?

To answer this and other questions, the UCI-led team proposes to examine CRD at the molecular level using transcriptomic (gene expression) and metabolomics techniques in mouse models.

“This will be a high-throughput process for researchers to take samples from healthy and diseased subjects every few hours along the circadian cycle,” Baldi said. It has limited applicability in humans, as only serum samples are available for physiotherapy, but it can be applied on a large scale in animal models, especially mice, by sampling tissues from different brain regions and different organs. These are large, laborious experiments that benefit from having a consortium of laboratories.”

If experiments were conducted in a systematic manner with respect to age, sex, and brain regions to investigate circadian molecular rhythms before and during disease progression, the mental health research community could identify potential biomarkers, causality It will help identify relationships, and new treatments, he added. Goals and means.

The project involved scientists from the UCI’s Department of Pharmacy, Center for Learning and Memory Neurobiology, Department of Computer Science, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, and the Institute of Genomics and Bioinformatics. So do UCLA’s Oppenheimer Center for the Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience and the Goodman Ruskin Microbiome Center. The National Institutes of Health provided financial support.