Not that you have a choice in these matters, but you might be better off getting injured during the day instead of at night.
New research has found that our body clocks (circadian rhythm) make wounds like cuts and burns heal faster depending on the time of the injury — a whopping 60 percent faster for injuries that happen in daytime versus nighttime. The study from the Cambridge, U.K.-based Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology was published in Science Translational Medicine.
Researchers tested their theory on skin cells and in mice. They also found the phenomenon happened in humans with burns, based on medical records from a database of major burn units in England and Wales. Lead author Ned Hoyle tells U.S. News they found the database by chance, connecting with Dr. John Blaikley of the University of Manchester at a conference. Blaikley said he knew someone who might have the data they were looking for.
Hoyle says that discovering the size of the effect was 60 percent was better than the researchers could’ve hoped for in their wildest dreams.
“It’s quite shocking that no one’s really noticed it before,” Hoyle tells U.S. News.
Researchers claim one of the reasons this occurred in their study was because skin cells traveled to the wound quicker during the daytime. At the cellular level, this has to do with increased activity of cell movement and repair proteins like actin, which worked like a muscle in the cell. Daytime wounds also had more of the main structural skin protein collagen.
“It may be that our bodies have evolved to heal fastest during the day when injuries are more likely to occur,” John O’Neill, senior author on the paper from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, said in a statement.
Hoyle says the clinical data was a nice cherry on top of the lab science results, but that it would be nice if there could someday be a proper clinical test made up of volunteers to receive slight wounds at different times of the day. He cautions it’s probably too early to make any predictions about applications.
O’Neill added in a statement, “It may be that healing time could be improved by resetting the cells’ clocks prior to surgery, perhaps by applying drugs that can reset the biological clock to the time of best healing in the operation site.”
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Your Wounds Heal Faster If They Happen During the Day, Study Says originally appeared on usnews.com
