In another summary at medicalXpress, the researchers mention melatonin
"Our research shows that the escape of circulating cancer cells from the original tumor is controlled by hormones such as melatonin, which determine our rhythms of day and night"
A lot of the literature suggests that it boosts the effects of chemotherapy. However chemotherapy damages host cells as well. It's unclear if melatonin promotes sparing of healthy cells that are dividing or simply boosts the effect of chemo everywhere.
Melatonin inhibits Warburg-dependent cancer by redirecting glucose oxidation to the mitochondria: a mechanistic hypothesis
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31970423/
Melatonin inhibits nuclear factor kappa B activation and oxidative stress and protects against thioacetamide induced liver damage in rats
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14672618/
*This is significant because one of the side effects of chemotherapy is increased NFkB, which can induce to tumor growth/resistance*
Melatonin inhibits AP-2β/hTERT, NF-κB/COX-2 and Akt/ERK and activates caspase/Cyto C signaling to enhance the antitumor activity of berberine in lung cancer cells
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4823085/
Sleep has been researched heavily (but far from conclusively), and there is an insane amount of diseases that people who don't get enough sleep are a risk group for. And some of those correlations are quite pronounced, like being ~30% more likely to get dementia if you don't get enough sleep in your 50s and 60s.
In some cases nobody can conclusively say whether there's causation, because we don't fully understand diseases like alzheimer or some of the processes happening during sleep, but in the meantime it seems prudent to sleep a healthy amount.
If you have the causation backwards in your phrasing, that implies that perhaps some people simply can't get good sleep even though they might try. You could say: you're 30% more likely to have sleep problems in your 50s and 60s if you're in the very early stages of developing dementia. Perhaps the disease process makes the sleep problems unavoidable and trying sleep more won't help.
The hour you go to bed doesn’t matter. You need a regular sleep schedule with enough sleep and that’s it.
What people mean, without realizing it, when they say the hours before midnight count double is that your first hours of sleep are the most important. Your sleep consists of several cycles, +- 90 minutes long. There are several stages of sleep in each cycle, deep sleep is the most important one. You are probably most familiar with the last stage, REM sleep. You get the most deep sleep in the first cycles, so in the first hours of sleeping.
But it doesn’t matter when those first hours are, the body has no concept of midnight.
That's what I want to believe but many people say that melatonin peaks in your body during these hours so you should be asleep then to maximize the positive effect. Conversely, they say if you don't sleep during these hours then you're hugely increasing your health risks.
So I'm trying to figure out if they're right or not because I'm 42 and I've been a night owl since 12 and yeah, nowadays my health is quite bad and I'm busting my arse trying to fix it.
There's none -- that's the best description, because it's not happening by schedule at all. Last night, for the first time in at least two months, I fell asleep at 3:00 AM. Usually it's 5:00 - 6:00.
Sometimes I sleep 4-5h and then have a huge nap -- 2.5h to 3.5h -- in the early evening. Happens for a week or two. Then I go without naps for a month.
It's relatively cyclical but the periods aren't with fixed values at all. The daily hours are fairly inconsistent as well.
I have issues sleeping sporadically. I am a naturally hyper person - and found that if I do not make my body and/or my mind very tired, I cannot sleep deeply.
So I must complete heavy workouts every 1-2 days to make my body want to sleep. Maybe start heavy exercise when you feel you're getting near that point.
For me - it is a weight workout (lifting or power lifting). I can do a 1-2 hour cardio workout (or sprints) to get a similar effect.
There are pockets of relative rationality in society, and pockets of altruism, and sometimes they even overlap in time and proximity. It's a big mess, this society thing, but you know, just focus on being your best self and a good influence on what's around you. Don't let the broad view of humanity bring you down. It's probably a bit skewed by some jerks using your biases against you to get your attention and show you ads or something, and there's truth to the "life is what you make of it" platitudes.
(Is this post now a self-referential platitude? ...is it self-aware? Maybe I can convince that one Googler it's come to life.)
It would be good to know what the immune system is doing during sleep. As I understand it, metastasis is caused by a local depletion in nutrients or stress to the tumor cells, which then try to find a new environment to occupy. If tumor-killing activity of the immune system happens primarily at night, that could explain why metastasis is also primarily at night, and may explain the discrepancy on melatonin which you just mentioned, where this study found that higher melatonin levels correlated with higher circulating tumor cell numbers, but the literature suggests that melatonin helps kill tumors.
> where this study found that higher melatonin levels correlated with higher circulating tumor cell numbers, but the literature suggests that melatonin helps kill tumors.
>> Melatonin exhibited various mechanisms to restrain metastasis, such as modulation of cell–cell and cell–matrix interaction, extracellular matrix remodeling by matrix metalloproteinases, readjustment of the cytoskeleton, epithelial-mesenchymal transition, and angiogenesis [127]. A recent study reported that the overexpression of the ADAMTS family in renal cell carcinoma was suppressed by melatonin via amplifying of miR-let-7f/miR-181d and reducing protein stability. It is of note that ADAMTS, a disintegrin, and metalloprotease with thrombospondin motifs family, thought to have an impact on cell metastasis and developing of cancer stages.
Note:
>> Melatonin has short plasma half-life, variable oral absorption, and low variable bioavailability that could be due to extensive first pass metabolism [327], in addition to its poor solubility and stability [328]. Therefore, conventional oral dosage forms (immediate release) are unsuitable candidates for melatonin delivery.
My general lay-person understanding is that your immune system is less active when you sleep. While I hate the way we tend to overlook other elements of the immune system and act like white blood cells are your entire immune system, in this case it may be very pertinent because white blood cells travel in the blood.
They may basically be going out into the blood when there are fewer white blood cells roaming the corridors, looking to kill something.
“Wake up” is a stretch, we have no idea what is going on here. Would be good to see how people’s circadian rhythms and sleep quality affected this process, maybe the cancer cells are being disposed of by the body during sleep and that process is disregulated. Fascinating research but I think getting to any real understanding from this is a way off.
So.. pretty much we can't rely on existing mechanisms in our bodies to defeat cancer. Obviously.. we need to find damaged cells, remove them, and replace them with undamaged cells. Likely we need to do this on a continuous basis.
Your immune system is continuously monitoring the body for cancerous cells. Each of us have probably had A cancerous cell hundreds of times. In order for the cancer to continue to grow, though, it needs a constellation of mutations to impede the immune response, among other things. Essentially, it's a race between a proto-tumor accreting more mutations, and the immune system finding and destroying it.
If we can figure out why this occurs during sleep, maybe we can trick cancer cells into thinking the patients are awake all the time (without actually affecting sleep wellness).
Not so unintuitive if you have seen enough molecular biology. A lot of cancers are the result of key cogs in the cellular / tissue growth machinery going crazy. A lot of tissue remodeling and growth happens while you sleep. So cancer cells going into turbo mode when you go to sleep doesn’t seem all that crazy.
Or slightly more obscure, Jane Aumonier [1] from Alastair Reynolds' book The Prefect, who ends up with a mysterious scarab device attached to her spine that will kill her if she falls asleep, so she has to be kept medically awake for 11 years.
"Our research shows that the escape of circulating cancer cells from the original tumor is controlled by hormones such as melatonin, which determine our rhythms of day and night"
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06-breast-cancer-night.h...