The blood test that tells you if you’re a night owl or a morning lark

The blood test that tells you if you’re a night owl or a morning lark

The blood test that tells you if you’re a night owl or a morning lark (and it will do wonders for your health)

  • Northwestern University scientists have identified a link between ‘circadian misalignment’ and diabetes, depression, obesity, heart disease and asthma
  • In doing so, they developed a blood test called TimeSignature to tell the ‘time’ inside the body
  • Knowing yours can help you adjust your life to your inner clock and prevent diseases 

Potentially lethal illnesses linked to our internal ‘body clock’ could be averted thanks to a simple blood test, according to a new study.

Researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago have identified a link between ‘circadian misalignment’ and diabetes, obesity, depression, heart disease and asthma.

And in doing so, they have developed a blood test – known as TimeSignature – that can tell the ‘time’ inside the body.

The team found that some individuals’ internal clocks are in sync with real time – but others are out of sync and considered misaligned.

Northwestern scientists have identified a link between ‘circadian misalignment’ and diabetes, depression, obesity, heart disease and asthma. In doing so, they developed a blood test

The researchers said that a misaligned ‘circadian rhythm’ can lead to diseases and ill health.

Examples include everything from heart disease, diabetes to Alzheimer’s disease – which can be averted with the new discovery.

Processes throughout the body are run by an internal biological clock, which directs the circadian rhythm, such as the sleep-wake cycle.

In the study, an algorithim was used to draw subjects’ blood every two hours – before the level of genes present were examined.

This allowed researchers to train a computer to predict the time of day that specific patterns of genes were present.

Out of 20,000 genes measured 40 patterns emerged – and can be easily identified by the new test – with a person’s lifestyle adjusted accordingly.


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Lead author Rosemary Braun, assistant professor of preventative medicine at the university’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said: ‘Various groups have tried to get at internal circadian time from a blood test, but nothing has been as accurate or as easy to use as this.

‘This is a much more precise and sophisticated measurement than identifying whether you are a morning lark or a night owl.

‘The TimeSignature allows us to assess a person’s biological clock within one-and-a-half hours.’

Previously, measurements this precise could only be achieved through a costly and labourious process of taking samples every hour over a span of multiple hours.

When the blood test eventually becomes clinically available, it will also provide doctors with the optimum time for medications.

Co-author Professor Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine in neurology at Feinberg, said: ‘This is really an integral part of personalised medicine – so many drugs have optimal times for dosing.

‘Knowing what time it is in your body is critical to getting the most effective benefits.

‘The best time for you to take the blood pressure drug or the chemotherapy or radiation may be different from somebody else.

‘Before we didn’t have a clinically feasible way of assessing the clock in healthy people and people with disease.

‘Now we can see if a disrupted clock correlates with various diseases and more importantly, if it can predict who is going to get sick.’

A link between circadian misalignment and diabetes, obesity, depression, heart disease and asthma has been identified in preclinical research.

Down the road, Dr Zee envisions improving health and treating disease by aligning people’s circadian clocks that are out of sync with external time.

She added: ‘Circadian timing is a modifiable risk factor for improving cognitive health, but if we can’t measure it, it’s difficult to know if we’ve made the right diagnosis – now we can measure it just like a lipid level.’

The software and algorithm are available for free to other researchers so they can assess physiological time in a person’s body.

The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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