Pills to adjust night–shift workers’ body clock

Montreal, January 17: What if a pill could help adjust your interl body clock to night shifts or jet lag the way it works during the day to elimite various health risks, including cancer? This may be possible, says a team of Australian researchers, with the administration of glucocorticoid tablets, a class of hormones used as powerful anti–inflammatory compounds to treat various diseases. "This new scientific discovery opens the door to innovative therapies that could act on the different parts of the circadian system so that these rhythms can be adjusted to inverted sleep schedules," said Diane B Boivin, director of the centre for study and treatment of circadian rhythms at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. For this, the team studied the rhythmic expression of clock genes in white blood cells to see how they adjusted in response to glucocorticoids. (IANS)