Did you know that asthma, heart attacks and many other health conditions tend to strike in the early hours of the morning?
One possible explanation for this mysterious phenomenon has been discovered by researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Biomolecular Sciences Department. In a study published in Cell Metabolism, the scientists found that a key component of our circadian clock – the 24-hour internal molecular clock that ticks away in every single cell – also regulates the body’s response to oxygen deficiency. This component, which undergoes changes over the course of the day and night, could affect the timing of outbreaks of diseases that are influenced by the body’s oxygen cycle.
“The mechanism we discovered is probably the main mechanism by which mammals cope with oxygen deficiency,” says Prof. Gad Asher. “These and other findings helped us understand that the circadian clock not only responds to oxygen deficiency, as was already known, but that it actually activates the body’s mechanism for dealing with oxygen deficiency.”
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(l-r) Dr. Nityanand Bolshette, Dr. Marina Golik, Vaishnavi Dandavate, Dr. Yaarit Adamovich, Gal Manella, and Prof. Gad Asher
