A newmathematical methoddeveloped by the University of Michigan and HospitalBrigham and Women Hospitalit will reduce the imbalance in the body caused by travel across time zones.
The main cause of this mismatch, known in English asjet lag, is the desynchronization between theinternal clockof the organism and the local environment when a person travels across several time zones. Symptoms include trouble sleeping at night and difficulty staying awake during the day. Thetimed exposure to lightit is a well-known method of synchronizing an individual’s internal clock with the environment in which it is found. That is why Dennis Dean and his team have developed a mathematical computing system that designs a personalized table of schedules with the exact times of the day when a subject located in a specific geographical point must apply countermeasures such as exposure to bright light. “Although this method is not yet available to the public, it does have direct implications for thedesign of work shifts and schedulesin extreme environments such asspace exploration, theunderwater explorationYin the polar regions“, explain the authors, who have published their conclusions in the latest issue of the journalPloS Computational Biology.
Dean has announced that the next phase of this research will try to figure out how to use naps, caffeine and melatonin to aid in the process of adjusting the body’s internal clock, while alleviating the decrease in performance experienced during travel. across time zones.
