The news of the 2017 Nobel Prize winners in Medicine and Physiology in the area of chronobiology – Americans Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young – will rekindle new discoveries about the “biological clock” of living beings. This is what Maria Filomena Ceolim, a researcher at the Faculty of Nursing at Unicamp (FEnf), believes, when speaking about the appropriateness of choosing experts to receive the most outstanding award in global scientific research.
The distinction was announced this Monday (2) in Sweden. Research began to be developed in the 1980s. “Even though there is the weight of the discovery itself, which is practically equivalent to the discovery of DNA, there is also the spotlight that the Nobel Prizes cast on our area of study. Therefore, we should see a strong increase in chronobiology research from this milestone”, qualified Filomena.
Among the findings of the work of Hall, Rosbash and Young are some discoveries about how plants, animals and human beings adapt to the biological rhythm to synchronize it with the rotation of the planet: the circadian cycle. They studied the functioning of the internal biological clock and the molecular mechanism that controls it. This matter remained, until now, unexplained, she revealed.
Filomena also said that global research into chronobiology had its starting point in the 1960s, when its first official event took place in the United States. In Brazil, research began in the 1980s, largely driven by the multidisciplinary group for the development of biological rhythms led by Professor Luiz Menna-Barreto, a professor at the University of São Paulo, he said.
The specialist took the opportunity to clarify that this topic is quite comprehensive and that it is worth a caveat: "when we talk about a biological clock, we are actually talking about a set of structures in the organism that functions as a biological clock. It is not a single structure, a single biological clock", she argues, but recognizes that this subject has its controversies in the chronobiology community.
Professor Filomena is one of the references at Unicamp on the topic. She has even just supervised a master's thesis authored by Cléber de Souza Oliveira about hospitalizations resulting from bipolar disorder according to the time of year. “It was documentary research carried out at the Health Service 'Dr. Cândido Ferreira' which consisted of evaluating when the most hospitalizations occurred, based on a 35-year retrospective survey,” she commented.
In the literature, the prevalence of hospitalizations in the mania phase, euphoria (when the individual's mood becomes exalted), occurred more in the summer. In Cléber's study, the finding was precisely the opposite: there was a lower prevalence in the manic phase of those investigated in the summer period.
Although the work did not aim to study the cause-effect phenomenon, one hypothesis put forward is that there was a synchronization of rhythms due to a longer period of luminosity. The study pointed to an association with sunspots, regions on the Sun's surface with a temperature lower than the local average and which, for this reason, appear to be darker.
Study object
Despite the relevance of chronobiology for understanding various behaviors related to human beings, Filomena stressed that there is a lack of interest, especially economic, in investigating the subject. She then pointed out an obstacle in the experimental part: studies in the area require controlled production conditions, which are too complex to be observed in traditional laboratories. There are studies that require animals to be in specific lighting conditions 24 hours a day.
The teacher explained that chronobiology studies how living matter is organized temporally. According to the expert, this issue is as important as spatial organization. "Their body structures are dynamic, but this does not occur randomly. They undergo changes regularly. There are peaks in the secretion of the hormone cortisol in the early morning, there are peaks in the growth hormone in the early morning, and the body temperature is highest at the end afternoon. There is, therefore, a 'planning' of the biological clock."
Even with organisms that remain in isolation in relation to time, with all their rhythms being measured (such as temperature and behavior), it was found that this rhythm did maintain a periodicity. “The cortisol peak continued to occur, and the temperature remained unchanged with few changes. Because our internal rhythm is a little longer than 24 hours, we adapt perfectly to the environment's schedule, which is set every 24 hours”, explained Filomena, who focuses on biological rhythms in adults and the elderly as one of the focuses of her research.
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