Researchers from the Britain's Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology have found that wounds caused by cuts or burns during the day could heal faster than the wounds which are sustained during the night.
A research paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine said the internal body clock, which regulates the functioning of every cell in the body, has a significant effect in the wound healing mechanism of organisms. The scientists found that the wounds formed during the daytime had 60 percent more healing power than those formed during nights.
The study found that the wounds which were formed between 8 am and 8 pm had higher rates of healing than the wounds which were formed between 8 pm and 8 am. They found that the daytime burns could heal in 17 days while the burns formed during the nights took around 28 days to heal.
The body clocks, also known as circadian rhythms, control the 24- hour cycles of the human body including the sleeping, hormone secretion, and metabolism.
The wounds are rapidly repaired during the daytime as collagen, the healing protein is actively depositing in the wounded region immediately after the accident.
This is the first time that the circadian clock within individual skin cells has been shown to determine how effectively they respond to injuries. John O' Neill, the co-led researcher from Britain's Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology said, "We consistently see about a two-fold difference in wound healing speed between the body clock's day and night. It may be that our bodies have evolved to heal faster during the day when injuries are more likely to occur."
John Blaikley, a clinical scientist from the Britain's University of Manchester, said that these new insights into the circadian factors might help in developing better wound-healing drugs. This new finding would help doctors to decide when to conduct surgeries or decide timings of the medicines based on the biological clocks of the patients.
The study of body clock mechanism has received international acclaim and the Nobel Prize for Medicine 2017 had been given to U.S biologist Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for their findings on "Molecular Mechanisms that control internal body clocks."
