Hmmm...that's very interesting. My internal clock has been screwed up all my life since childhood. My body's tendency is to stay up at night and sleeping during the day. I wonder how many people with BPD have this problem. According to these articles, scientists believe there's a link between mood swings and disruptions in the body's internal clock (circadium).
Here's the article:
New insights about Bipolar disorder treatment
Bipolar Disorder News | 29 May 2012
The extreme 'mood swings’ associated with bipolar disorder have been associated with disruptions in circadian rhythms for a number of years now. Circadian rhythms is the body’s internal clock system that governs your day and night states. For years lithium chloride has been one of the main treatments for bipolar disorder. However, there has been a paucity of research to find out whether and how lithium impacts on the brain and peripheral body clockwork.
But studies at Manchester University have shed new light on the topic.
"Our study has shown a new and potent effect of lithium in increasing the amplitude, or strength, of the clock rhythms, revealing a novel link between the classic mood-stabilizer, bipolar disorder and body clocks," said lead researcher Dr Qing-Jun Meng, in the University of Manchester’s Faculty of Life Sciences.
"By tracking the dynamics of a key clock protein, we discovered that lithium increased the strength of the clockwork in cells up to three-fold by blocking the actions of an enzyme called glycogen synthase kinase or GSK3.
"Our findings are important for two reasons: firstly, they offer a novel explanation as to how lithium may be able to stabilize mood swings in bipolar patients; secondly, they open up opportunities to develop new drugs for bipolar disorder that mimic and even enhance the effect lithium has on GSK3 without the side-effects lithium salts can cause."
These side-effects include nausea, acne, thirstiness, muscle weakness, tremor, sedation and/or confusion. Promisingly, GSK3 inhibiting drugs are already in development, as they have been shown to be important in other diseases, including diabetes and Alzheimer's disease.
Dr Meng added: "Lithium salt has a wide spectrum of targets within cells, in addition to GSK3; drugs which only block the actions of GSK3 would therefore have the major advantage of reduced 'off-target' effects of lithium.
"Our study has identified the robust rhythm-enhancing effect of GSK3 inhibition, which has potential to be developed as a new pharmacological approach to regulate body clocks. The implications of our study are that there may also be beneficial effects leading to new treatments for bipolar disorder, and this now needs to be tested".
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Here's another article about a study that will test this theory.
How the brain's daily clock controls mood: A new project
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A math professor at the University of Michigan will lead an international, $1 million project examining the links between bipolar disorderand abnormalities in the circadian, or daily, rhythms of a mammal's internal clock.
In humans, this grain-of-rice-sized timepiece is a cluster of 20,000 neurons right behind the eyes. It's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the brain's hypothalamus, and it is responsible for keeping our bodies in synch with our planet's 24-hour day.
Scientists believe it's off kilter in patients with bipolar disorder. Some of the genes implicated in the disease are the same ones that regulate the biological clock. The common treatment drug lithium is known to change the period of that clock, and when manic patients are forced to stay on a 24-hour schedule, many experience a reprieve from the episode, said principal investigator Daniel Forger, an associate professor in the U-M Department of Mathematics.
Exactly how the brain's clock controls mood remains a mystery, though. This new project aims to change that through complex mathematical modeling and experiments involving mice.
"We're going to continuously monitor the state of the animals' internal clock. We'll watch it tick, use mathematics to understand its function and test how it controls mood," Forger said.
The researchers will examine the brains of depressed and normal mice and look for abnormal electrical activity. The researchers aim to determine what state of the clock region corresponds with different moods in the animals.
"We're going to learn an awful lot about the circadian clock, which could also, in addition todepression, play a role in Alzheimer's, cancer and heart attacks," Forger said.
Also involved in this project are Toru Takumi, a professor in the Laboratory of Integrative Bioscience at Hiroshima University in Japan, and Hugh Piggins, a professor of life sciences at the University of Manchester in England. The project is funded by a competitive international Human Frontier Science Program Grant, which supports basic life science research with funding from 13 countries and the European Union.
Related Links:
• Daniel Forger:
UM Mathematics-FacultyDetail
