Your 24 Hour Body Clock: How It Controls Everything from Sleep To When You Should Take Medication - What Your GP Doesn't Tell You Podcast

Professor Russell Foster reveals the key role our body clock plays in every aspect of our biology and health

The latest episode of the What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You Podcast - Your 24 Hour Body Clock: How It Controls Everything From Sleep To When You Should Take Medication is now available on Apple , Spotify and other podcast platforms. And you can sign up to the podcast mailing list at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You, where you can also find out more about the pod. The next podcast episode will be available on Tuesday 27th June.

In this edition of the podcast, I talk to Russell Foster, Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at Oxford University, who discusses how our internal 24 hour clock can really be thought of as the body’s organiser, ensuring that the right chemicals and nutrients are supplied to the correct tissues and organs at the appropriate time of day.

In this clip, Foster explains how the clock is controlled by our body:

Usually when one thinks of a circadian system, the first thing that springs to mind is sleep and that is certainly one of its essential roles. Today, with the availability of many sleep apps, there is perhaps more focus on getting enough sleep than ever before, but Foster explains we don’t all need the same amount of sleep and worrying about how much sleep we’re getting is likely to be highly counterproductive:

So, in the podcast, Foster goes on to give his tips about what you need to do to get a good night’s sleep and the importance of staying calm if and when you do wake up.

But for those who do nightshift work, getting good high quality sleep can be much harder. Foster reveals how sustained shortened sleep, can lead to a wide range of health problems for those working irregular hours and believes there is not nearly enough focus on this.

For me, one of the most fascinating areas of all in our discussion is the field of chrono pharmacology. This suggests that the time of day we take some drugs can have a major impact on their effectiveness. It’s an issue that receives little attention in current day-to-day medical practice. Yet as Foster explains, studies are showing the time of day you take a drug can - in some cases - double or even quadruple its efficacy:

Despite the fact that there are now over 200 Food and Drug Administration approved drugs that have been shown to have a time of day effect, this potential benefit remains largely unexploited by healthcare systems across the world. And Foster also makes the point that time of day testing has major implications for drug discovery. That’s because testing a pharmaceutical at the wrong time of day, might suggest it’s ineffective, whereas testing it at a different time could potentially give very different results.

So perhaps it is time for those organisations that write clinical guidelines, such as the UK’s National Institute of Clinical Evidence (NICE), to take a look at this chrono pharmacology evidence and see if there are aspects which could be useful added for future medical practice.

Russell Foster is Professor of Circadian Neuroscience, Director of the Sir Jules Thorne Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute, and Head of the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology at Oxford University. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and was awarded a CBE for his services to science. And he is the author of the book Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionise Your Health.

You can find out more about the podcast at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You and follow me on Twitter @lizctucker.

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