U-RHYTHM: A powerful research tool for studies on human rhythms in Health and Disease

Studies using animals have demonstrated that almost all body functions have a rhythm that changes across the day-and that disturbance of these rhythms leads to many health problems. Understanding the effect of rhythm disturbances on human health is critical-but is much more difficult to study since the only way we can perform temporal studies like this in man is to bring patients into a clinical research facility and take multiple blood samples over the day. This is expensive, stressful to the subject and results in disturbed sleep which invalidates much of the data. This grant will help solve this problem by providing a new research tool - U-RHYTHM which will enable these rhythms to be investigated in the home or work environment. This work will: - Identify how mistimed sleep and shift work create health risks - Improve diagnosis of hypertension and decisions on therapy. - Improve understanding of timing in human inflammation.