It really drives me crazy that Susie wrote this book six years ago, and studies are just now coming out, but they never cite it because it wasn't in an academic journal. I just had a talk with the people at the New York Times about the same thing. I'm going to send the Independent a copy.

-NR

Circadian key to cancer?
Study on artificial light and breast cancer finds shift workers less at risk than other women up late at night
BY DELTHIA RICKS
Newsday Staff Writer

June 28, 2006


Exposure to frequent artificial light at night appears to increase the breast cancer risk among women in their homes, but apparently not among those who work late shifts, according to an analysis by a Long Island researcher.

Dr. Cristina Leske, a professor of preventive medicine at Stony Brook University, questioned 576 Long Island women who developed breast cancer and 585 who never had the disease to determine whether exposure to artificial light plays a role.

The notion is not farfetched, according to Leske and other researchers who have been chasing the hypothesis that exposure to light at night is a breast cancer risk factor. They contend that hormones function in a circadian rhythm, based on the body's internal 24-hour clock.

At night, the hormone melatonin, the so-called sleep hormone, streams into the blood and flows throughout the night suppressing cancer cells, scientists say. Melatonin is switched off by the presence of light and then estrogen switches on. Estrogen, the female hormone produced by the ovaries, is a well known cancer promoter.

Leske found in a subset of women who had developed breast cancer that they tended to wake up frequently during the night and turned on lights during what should have been hours set aside for sleeping. In her study, the positive association with breast cancer was 65 percent. Among overnight shift workers, Leske found a 45-percent lower breast cancer risk.

"Exposure to light at night would increase breast cancer because of the effect of light on melatonin," Leske said. But her results suggest that shift workers somehow altered their circadian clocks so that their hormone flow adapted to their work schedules. Her epidemiologic study is reported in the current issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.

In previous studies, there was a strong association between shiftwork and exposure to light at night. But the new analysis by Leske suggests shiftworkers don't have as high a risk as someone who stays awake late with lights burning - and melatonin switched off.

Dr. David E. Blask, widely noted for both animal and human studies involving the circadian hypothesis of breast cancer, said Leske's results are intriguing. "It's a very well done study," said Blask, a scientist at the Bassett Research Institute in Cooperstown, N.Y. "A problem is that the results are not clear."

Blask has proven in laboratory studies that melatonin serves as an anti-tumor growth signal to human breast cancer cells. "There may be something special about the Long Island population. They weren't nurses and come from different backgrounds compared with the subjects in other studies."

http://www.newsday.com/news/health/...0,4241345.story

This is a perfect example of getting the right conclusion, due to statistics, but totally missing the point due to a lack of basic scientific research.

Susie pointed all of this out 6 years ago, only she understood the basic mechanism behind it. Estrogen doesn't cause cancer. How could it? A woman's estrogen levels are highest when she is young - she develops breast cancer as she ages. It's the low levels of estrogen that are the problem.

This estrogen-cancer thing is like the flat world theory. Every conclusion argued from it, no matter how well formed, will lead to wrong conclusions.

And they just keep coming. I truncated this, but look at cause #1 and #2

Obesity More Complex Than We Think?
10 Possible Causes of America's Obesity Epidemic -- Besides Gluttony and Sloth
By Daniel DeNoon
WebMD Medical News Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD
on Tuesday, June 27, 2006



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June 27, 2006 -- Obesity isn't all about eating and inactivity, says an international group of researchers.
Just about everywhere you look, doctors are blaming America's obesity epidemic on two things: too much food -- especially widely marketed fast food and junk food -- and too little exercise, with too much time in front of the TV.
But we're paying too much attention to the "big two," argue David B. Allison, PhD, director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham clinical nutritionnutrition research center, and his colleagues.
"The importance of the big two is accepted as established, and other putative factors are not seriously explored," they argue. "The result may be well-intentioned but ill-founded proposals for reducing obesity rates."
To stimulate debate, Allison and colleagues suggest 10 other possible causes of obesity. Their article appears in this week's online edition of the International Journal of Obesity.
It's well accepted that reduced physical activity and fast food are linked to obesity. But the evidence that these are the main causes of obesity is "largely circumstantial," Allison and colleagues say.
Obesity researchers should broaden their horizon, they argue. So the researchers propose 10 other explanations for obesity, which are also supported by circumstantial evidence.
Even if some of these causes have only a small effect, Allison and his colleagues say, they may interact in ways that greatly magnify their individual effects.
10 Causes of Obesity
The researchers put forth these 10 "additional explanations" for obesity:
1. Sleep debt. Getting too little sleep can increase body weight. Today's Americans get less shut-eye than ever.
2. Pollution. Hormones control body weight. And many of today's pollutants affect our hormones.

Thank goodness, an actual attempt at science in place of accepted dogma.

How does this work exactly? If it's the amount of light that reaches the eyes, I sleep with my eyes closed. If it's the amount of light that reaches the skin, most of my skin would be in the dark, under the covers.

I sleep with the TV on (on mute) and sometimes I turn on an extra lamp, too. I am very afraid of the dark.

Well, I suspect the body has several ways to detect the presence of light. There was one study of melatonin I believe in which they just shined a pointy blue light at the back of the knees and the body reacted.

Thank you very much for relaying my questions (and thank her for taking the time to answer them! I understand how busy she is, and I do appreciate that she actually answered them.

Based on my experiences, keeping rhythm is the most important thing (health wise). It's not about absolute darkness at night, or a life free of intervention of artificial light... it is about keeping your clock as regular as possible. Artificial light is a problem only because it gives us the ability to manipulate when we experience light, therefore it gives us the potential ability to confound our clocks.

Evidence is I can adapt to *any* rhythm of sleep/wake (thus, a whole different light patterns). All of the research seems to imply the body can measure and track light, but none of the research even remotely suggests there is absolute requirement/threshold for light at certain times. Therefore, light is just a marker your body uses to establish rhythm. Humans can adapt to dark environments and bright environments as long as changes in light follow a predictable and constant pattern. Health problems manifest only when there is a change in the light cycle, because this confounds your clock, and that confounds physiology.

That sudden light suppresses melatonin in during sleep doesn't necessarily mean we require absolute darkness in sleep, or even that anything but absolute dark suppresses melotonin... it just means most people's rhythms are set to a certain amount of light at night (and anything more than that confounds clock/physiology).

Therefore, the problem is NOT light, or even artificial light, but *lack of synchronicity with whatever environment you live in*. It's not a light - at - night thing, since there is no absolute requirement for light, and there is no homogeneity in light (even *before* we invented them). It's a broken rhythm thing. Our only requirement is for predictable and cyclical patterns of light. .. and it is only *now* that we have the power to do that.

Ironically, trying to achieve total darkness at night is actually counterintuitive, because you put yourself in a position where your hypersensitive to light change. That just isn't the way of things. It's not natural.
If my theory is correct, the only problem with unconventional sleep/wake cycles is it puts you at a greater risk for disturbed rhythm (due to social intrusion and obligation). So, trying to replicate prehistory puts you at the same risk as a shift worker: you're going against the flow, making it so much more likely that your clock will be repeatedly disturbed.

I've heard that a red light won't register as "light" and disrupt the melatonin, but I don't know how true that is.

I would have thought so too... as long as you sleep well and regularly, you should be set. But look at this bit I got from Wikipedia:




If I am reading this correctly, the circadian cycle and melatonin are both regulated by the SCN as opposed to melatonin being the regulator of the circadian cycle. So even if your regularity isn't affected by light, that doesn't mean your melatonin production is fine.

It's all explained in the book. How do you suppose blind people know when it's dark? Light enters the skin and reacts with elements in the blood where it's close to the surface.

That's right.

And here is another story today. I'm frustrated that Lights Out is never cited.

Source: Dartmouth Medical School

Posted: June 30, 2006
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Novel Connection Found Between Biological Clock And Cancer
Dartmouth Medical School geneticists have discovered that DNA damage resets the cellular circadian clock, suggesting links among circadian timing, the cycle of cell division, and the propensity for cancer.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Their work, reported June 29 in Science Express, the advance electronic publication of Science, implies a protective dimension for the biological clock in addition to its pacemaker functions that play such a sweeping role in the rhythms and activities of life.

"The notion that the clock regulates DNA-damage input and that mutation can affect the clock as well as the cell cycle is novel," says Jay Dunlap, professor and chair of genetics at DMS. "It suggests a fundamental connection among circadian timing, cell cycle progress, and potentially the origins of some cancers."

Dunlap is a co-author of the paper with DMS colleagues, Jennifer Loros, professor of biochemistry, graduate student Christopher L. Baker, and former students António M. Pregueiro and Qiuyun Liu.

The team of Loros and Dunlap were among to first to delineate the intricate web of clockwork genes, proteins and feedback loops that drive circadian rhythms, working chiefly in the classic genetic model organism Neurospora, the common bread mold.

One gene (period-4) was identified over 25 years ago by a mutation that affects two clock properties, shortening the circadian period and altering temperature compensation. For this study, the researchers cloned the gene based on its position in the genome, and found it was an important cell cycle regulator. When they eliminated the gene from the genome, the clock was normal, indicating that the mutation interfered in some way with the clock, rather than supplying something that the clock normally needs to run.

Biochemically, the mutation results in a premature modification of the well understood clock protein, frequency (FRQ). The investigators demonstrated that this was a direct result of action by an enzyme, called in mammals checkpoint kinase-2 (CHK2), whose normal role is exclusively in regulating the cell division cycle. CHK2 physically interacts with FRQ; the mutation makes this interaction much stronger. However, a mutant enzyme that has lost its activity has no effect on the clock.

Normally CHK2 is involved in the signal response pathway that begins when DNA is damaged and results in a temporary stoppage of cell division until the damage is fixed. The researchers found that the resetting effect of DNA damage requires the period-4 clock protein, and that period-4 is the homolog, the Neurospora version, of the mammalian checkpoint kinase.

Moreover, the clock regulates expression of the period-4 gene. This closes a loop connecting the clock to period-4 and period-4 to the clock and the cell cycle. The clock normally modulates expression of this gene that encodes an important cell cycle regulator, and that cell cycle regulator in turn affects not only the cell cycle but also the clock.

Recent evidence in mammalian cells shows that other cell cycle regulators physically interact with clock proteins. Loss of at least one clock protein (mammalian period-2) is known to increase cancer susceptibility. The coordination of the clock and cell division through cell cycle checkpoints, supports the clock's "integral role in basic cell biology," conclude the researchers." Their work can help advance understanding of cancer origins as well as the timing of anti-cancer treatment.

***************************

You heard it first Lights Out (6 years ago)

And here is another story today. I'm frustrated that Lights Out is never cited.

Title: ScienceDaily: Sleep Deprivation Doubles Risks Of Obesity In Both Children And Adults
Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...60713081140.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6071301121.html