People with severe depression have a disrupted “biological clock” that makes it seem as if they are living in a different time zone to the rest of the healthy population living alongside them, a study has found.
It is the first time that depression has been linked unequivocally to the internal circadian clock of the human brain, which regulates the body's day-and-night cycle over a 24 hour period, scientists said.
The researchers found that they could estimate a healthy person's time of death to within a few hours by analysing the activity levels of a set of genes - whether they are switched on 'high' or 'low' - within certain regions of the deceased brain.
However, this correlation broke down when they analysed the autopsied brains of people who had suffered from depression. Their gene activity bore little relationship to the hour of death, which indicated they suffered a severely disrupted sleeping pattern, the scientists found.
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