Body clock disruption can cause diabetes and heart attack

Disruption in the body clock or circadian rhythm can not only cause obesity, but also increase the risk of diabetes and heart attacks, a new study has found.

That is the conclusion of the first study to show definitively that insulin activity is controlled by the body's circadian biological clock.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, helps explain why not only what you eat, but when you eat, matters.

The study was conducted by a team of Vanderbilt scientists led by Carl Johnson, Owen McGuinness and David Wasserman.

"Our study confirms that it is not only what you eat and how much you eat that is important for a healthy lifestyle, but when you eat is also very important," said researcher postdoctoral fellow Shu-qun Shi.

In recent years, a number of studies in both mice and men have found a variety of links between the operation of the body's biological clock and various aspects of its metabolism, the physical and chemical processes that provide energy and produce, maintain and destroy tissue.

It was generally assumed that these variations were caused in response to insulin, which is one of the most potent metabolic hormones.

However, no one had actually determined that insulin action follows a 24-hour cycle or what happens when the body's circadian clock is disrupted.

Because they are nocturnal, mice have a circadian rhythm that is the mirror image of that of humans: They are active during the night and sleep during the day.

Scientists have found that the internal timekeeping system of the two species operate in nearly the same way at the molecular level.

Most types of cells contain their own molecular clocks, all of which are controlled by a master circadian clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the brain.

"People have suspected that our cells' response to insulin had a circadian cycle, but we are the first to have actually measured it. The master clock in the central nervous system drives the cycle and insulin response follows," said McGuinness in a statement.