Wounds Heal More Quickly if It Happened on Daytime
Wounds heal more quickly if they happen throughout the daytime instead of after dark, a study suggests.
It discovered just 17 days for those that occurred in the daytime, although burns took an average of 28 days to cure.
The team, at the UK's MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, stated they had been astounded by the difference they saw at 118 burns patients that they studied.
The way body clock ticks inside just about any individual cell throughout a cycle explained the effect.
The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, examined 118 patients at NHS burns units.
It showed the average difference in healing times between individuals hurt at night and throughout the day.
Lab work showed skin cells called their skills were changing.
Fibroblasts are the body's first responders, rushing to close a wound.
During the daytime, they're primed to respond, but they lose this capability at night.
Dr. John O'Neill, one of the investigators, told the BBC: "It's like the 100m. The sprinter back on the cubes, poised and ready to go, is always going to beat the man going from a standing start."
The investigators believe that they could use this understanding.
Some drugs, such as the cortisol, can reset the body clock of an individual cell and may be useful in night-time procedures.
And everyone's body clock runs into a slightly different pattern or "chronotype."
Therefore, it may make sense to schedule operations to keep in time with the patients' 24-hour "circadian rhythms."
Both thoughts are still untested.
Dr. John Blaikley, a clinician scientist at the University of Manchester, said: "Treatment of wounds costs the NHS about $5bn, which can be partly because of a shortage of successful therapies targeting wound closing.
"By taking these factors into consideration, not merely could novel drug targets be identified, but also the effectiveness of established therapies may be increased through changing what time of day they're given."
