HEALTH COACH - Second opinion: chronically tired? Maybe these are your genes - Health

HEALTH COACH -

The second opinion is an essential dose of the health and medical news from journalist Kelly Crowe and CBC Health.

A clock of 24 hours and a half

What if you are genetically programmed with a natural body clock that lasts more than 24 hours? It has been established that wake-sleep cycles are controlled by a genetically encoded intrinsic circadian rhythm.

Now researchers at Rockefeller University have found a gene variant in some people who interfere with the onset of their sleep about 30 minutes or so. So for those people, a perfect day would be 24 hours and a half.

In the study, published in the journal Cell, researchers report that one in 75 people in some populations might be carrying this "nocturnal" gene variant.

People who identify as nocturnal owls are often diagnosed with a delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD), which makes them energetic long after most people have struck the pillow .

If they could come to work or school whenever they wanted, they would be able to have a healthy sleep. But this variant of gene could explain why some people are temporarily deprived of sleep in a society programmed around a 24-hour clock.

How Canada missed a chance to prevent thousands of heart attacks

Scientists have discovered that mosquitoes do not lay their eggs in standing water (Dr. Burkitt-Cadena)

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Nathan Burkett-Cadena has not attempted to prove that the manuals on mosquitoes are false. He was just trying to push mosquitoes in his lab at the University of Florida to study them. It trapped pregnant women from a species of tropical mosquito known to carry a virus that can cause human encephalitis. He put some dishes in the cages to put their eggs. After all, his manual on medical entomology said that Culex mosquitoes lay their eggs on the surface of the water.

But his Culex (Melanoconion) mosquitoes did not do that. In fact, they died without putting their eggs, until he put the flowerpots in the cage, on an intuition. Immediately, they began putting clusters of high and dry eggs inside the pots.

Burkett-Cadena calls it a "paradigm shift" in understanding the biology of mosquitoes. What are the consequences for mosquito control? "This has made the job more difficult, it is the result," said Burkett-Cadena. Although this particular subgenus is tropical, there are other Culex mosquitoes in Canada. Did the mosquitoes Culex found in Canada also put their eggs out of the water? "We do not know, it is quite possible," he said.

"This means that many of the generalizations we are making about egg laying in mosquitoes require a lot of re-examination. I suspect that most species of Culex do not conform to the description of the book Manual of their egg - habits of work. "

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Kelly Crowe