Almost every year for almost 20, Someone has taken To the United States Congress the idea of ending the change of time. In Europe, We have spent hours and hours engaged in the discussion of what to do with him. Many countries, in fact, They have sent it to the history drawer (Others, on the other hand, They have recovered it again). I am still surprising that such a simple thing can unleash such great passions.
Passions and, above all, reasons. Because there are hundreds of researchers trying to understand which time policy is better. That is why we talk about it again: because the Internet has filled with holders that ensure that “a study reveals that the change of time contributes to thousands of brain infarctions.”
It’s true? What do we really know about the subject?
How can the time change affect our health? The body has an internal clock of (approximately) 24 hours that helps regulate our physical and mental functioning. And not, It is not a way of speaking: As is in charge of innumerable physiological processes, the time we eat depends on that clock, to which we sleep, it even determines when we go to the bathroom. Ignore your permanent tick can cause discomfort or even a certain moment, serious diseases. Is What we call circadian rhythm.
With this in mind, during this century, scientists have suspected that the hourly change should have some impact on those rhythms and, moreover, on health. The problem is that one thing is to intuit that impact and a different one is to be able to prove it.
And what has this last study done? Stanford Medicine researchers They have compared how they affected circadian rhythms and general health in different different time policies (the winter schedule, summer and schedule with biannual change).
To do this, based on the local exit and sunset hours, they analyzed the real exposure to the light under each time policy, the circadian impacts and the socio -health characteristics of each American county. It is not easy and has a high statistical component (and, in some segments, speculative), but it is an interesting exercise
What have you discovered? In general terms, The team found that “maintaining the standard schedule or summer schedule is definitely better than changing twice a year.” According to their data, the winter schedule “would avoid about 300,000 cases of stroke per year and reduce obesity in 2.6 million people.” The summer schedule, meanwhile, “permanent would achieve approximately two thirds of the same effect.”
And why would it happen? “When there is light in the morning, the circadian cycle is accelerated. When there is light in the afternoon, it slows down … explained Jamie ZeitzerProfessor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Standford.
“The more light exposure is received at inappropriate times, the weaker the circadian clock is. All these factors that influence the life cycle – for example, the immune system and energy – do not synchronize so well,” He continued. The question we must ask ourselves, according to these researchers, is what time policy helps to better adjust circadian rhythms.
And the answer, at least for the US set, is that most people would support a lower circadian mismatch with the winter schedule.
Does that mean that winter schedule is better? Actually, no. It is possible that it is the most complete study to date, but (As the researchers themselves recognize) There are many factors that researchers did not take into account and that, by itself, can reduce gain very substantively.
But even giving the methodology good and accepting that citizens behave as researchers suppose, we would have to reproduce the analysis in Spain (or our reference countries) to know what the final result would be. After all, The countries that change the time are a minority And it makes sense to think that there are scenarios in which the time change could help reduce that circadian mismatch.
One of the problems of countries as large as the US (or realities as diverse as EU) is that making joint decisions is difficult.
And then? I’m afraid that we are a little better than before, but almost in the same place: we still have no remotely if it is good or bad, and that we attribute more and more things.
Image | Sonja Langford | NCI
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