Researcher Greg Murray at the Swinburne University of Technology has done a thorough study of the body clock or the circadian system and has come to the conclusion that its patterns can have a bearing on the mood of human beings.
Mood disorders such as bipolar disorder have been associated with sleep problems. This means that the circadian system does play a role in these conditions.
Bipolar disorder is basically a category of mood disorders where a person experiences one or more episodes of abnormally elevated mood. The clinical term for this is ‘mania’. A person might also experience depressive symptoms.
According to Murray, “If you take seriously this idea that the body clock is part of a casual pathway to mood disorders, then a natural deduction is that monitoring clock function might provide early warning of relapse in vulnerable people.”
The current research study basically stresses on the fact that there is a connection between the body clock and certain psychological responses. These responses include the capacity to trigger relapses in patients with bipolar disorder.
The project which was funded by the National Depressiondefine Initiative, took into account 12 volunteers with bipolar disorder. They were fitted with wrist-worn devices in order to gauge their circadian system by measuring physical activity throughout the day and night.
The volunteers were monitored for up to a year. During this period, one participant experienced a serious relapse and had to be taken to the hospital.
“For our purpose, it was very interesting that circadian activity data really did show a marked signal of deterioration in the days and even weeks before the relapse,” Murray noted.
The researchers are also working on analyzing the actigraph data to find the time scale at which rhythm disruption is most apparent.
The next stage of the research will focus on whether the signals of rhythm disruption in patients can be used as a baseline for vulnerability to bipolar disorder in general population.
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