BOULDER, Colo. (KDVR) — Getting a good night of sleep might be as simple as getting your blood drawn. New research from CU Boulder found that it’s possible to determine the timing of a person’s internal circadian clock by analyzing a combination of molecules in a single blood draw.
“If we can understand each individual person’s circadian clock, we can potentially prescribe the optimal time of day for them to be eating or exercising or taking medication,” said senior author Christopher Depner, who conducted the study while an assistant professor of integrative physiology at CU Boulder. “From a personalized medicine perspective, it could be groundbreaking.”
According to the research, even among healthy people, sleep-wake cycles can vary by four to six hours.
How the research was performed:
- Researchers brought 16 volunteers to live in a sleep lab for 14 days under tightly controlled conditions.
- Researchers said that in addition to testing their blood for melatonin hourly, they also used a method called “metabolomics,” assessing levels of about 4,000 different metabolites (things like amino acids, vitamins and fatty acids that are byproducts of metabolism) in the blood.
- Then, they used a machine learning algorithm to determine which collection of metabolites were associated with the circadian clock, creating a sort of molecular fingerprint for individual circadian phases.
Results:
When they tried to predict circadian phase based on this fingerprint from a single blood draw, their findings were within about one hour of those using the more difficult melatonin test.
According to the CU team, much more research is necessary before an affordable blood test could be made commercially available.