National Geographic June 2016 issue: Medication feature

On-Time Treatments

They say there is a time for everything - though you might not know it from looking at a pill-bottle label. Most say how many pills to take but not when to take them.

That’s a problem, “because symptoms and treatment efficacy vary by time of day,” say University of Texas at Austin biomedical engineering professor Michael Smolensky. Strokes, for instance, tend to occur in the morning; asthma usually flares up at night. “If you take your medication at the wrong time,” he says, “it may not work as well…or you could experience more side effects and toxicity.”

Humans and animals have a set of internal clocks in their brains, organs, tissues, and cells that naturally synchs with Earth’s 24-hour light-dark cycle. Timing medications to those circadian rhythms is called chronotherapy- a field still foreign to many prescribers. Circadian biologist Georgios Paschos of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine suggests a remedy: “more clinical trials that investigate the optimal timing of drug administration.” - by Jeremy Berlin

Copyright belongs to NGM

Chronotherapy and Gene Therapy sounds like the way to go in the future. If they could only target the Negative Symptoms we might be further along than we are now.

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Do you have a link for this? :slight_smile: It’s interesting.

No link, sorry :confused:

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:slight_smile: Too bad. I would like to see it, I don’t think we get the same articles in Portugal.

Here’s a link but I don’t think it’s to the complete article.

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Thanks Moonbeam :slight_smile: