I hate changing from standard time to daylight saving time. And I'm not alone. Going from DST to standard time is OK, but that change in the spring? Good grief. So I'm open to any excuse for getting rid of DST, no matter how thin the evidence. In his book, Why We Sleep, Dr. Matthew Walker points out that each year there is a remarkable spike in deaths due to heart attacks and traffic accidents in the days following the change. We hate it, but the special interest lobbies have kept the government from taking action to do away with it. But I want to add one more "justification" for junking it.
As we know, Alzheimer's disease can be understood as an inflammatory disease, and controlling inflammation helps control the disease. What would it mean if we found that, in addition to heart attacks and car wrecks, the time change was aggravating inflammation, and hence, Alzheimer's disease -- or maybe, increasing the likelihood that someone would develop it? (If they don't care enough about the heart attacks and car wrecks, would they care about this?)
There's some new research published in the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. The research report was entitled "Time-of-day control of mitochondria regulates NLRP3 inflammasome activation in macrophages," and it studied how inflammatory activity in the body (promoted by the cytokines we have discussed before) varies with your circadian rhythm -- based on time of day. So, for example, arthritis pain from inflammation tends to be worse in the morning than later in the day.
It stands to reason (at least to my reason) that disturbing the circadian rhythm will disturb inflammatory diseases ... like arthritis and Alzheimer's disease. So we should do away with things that disturb the circadian rhythm. Now, there's nothing in the research that explicitly supports my thinking, but I want to promote any excuse for getting rid of Daylight Saving Time!
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