• Question: Could working a nocturnal sleep cycle rather than a diurnal one have an effect on the growth of cancerous cells?

    Asked by anon-331976 on 29 Jun 2022.
    • Photo: Sophie Richardson

      Sophie Richardson answered on 25 Jun 2022:

      Good question Jack! There is evidence being published by scientists that suggests that working night shifts and frequent jet lag could increase a person’s risk of developing cancer and some other diseases. So sleep is really important!

      I’m not sure what would happen if you permanently switched to being nocturnal though. Maybe it wouldn’t if that was your body’s natural rhythm? Because research seems to suggest it is a change to the body’s natural rhythm that increases risk of cancer. As humans, we tend to sleep at night and be awake during the day, so I think it would be difficult to become permanently nocturnal.

    • Photo: Maria Peiris Pages

      Maria Peiris Pages answered on 27 Jun 2022:

      This is a great question!!! Fresh from the over, a few days ago it was published a paper in Nature where the authors observed that cancer cells generate circulating tumour cells in the blood more during the night, and therefore the sleep-night cycle influences the behaviour of cancer cells!

    • Photo: Karin Purshouse

      Karin Purshouse answered on 28 Jun 2022:

      So JackS your question could not have been better timed. I’ve seen this article that scientists are sharing around Twitter that has been published in a famous science journal called Nature. The scientists basically found that in metastatic breast cancer (so that’s breast cancer that has already spread to other places), cancer cells move more at night time! They suggests that’s due to a number of possible factors important during sleep – like the hormones that govern our waking and sleeping moments

      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04875-y

      This idea totally blows my mind – the main implication is that perhaps cancer cells move differently at different times of the day, and perhaps that means cancer treatment should be given at different times of the day. But important to say this is the first study to show this, so we definitely need more data to understand this further. But a good example of translational medicine – i.e. taking samples from a patient, doing scientific experiments, and then considering how this relates back to the original patients.

Comments