Health

Wounds Can Heal Faster Depending On When The Injury Happened

Your body's circadian clock regulates a lot of your bodily functions, but researchers figured out that same clock can also influence cell activity.

Wounds Can Heal Faster Depending On When The Injury Happened
Dean Mouhtaropoulos / Getty Images
Article by Tyler Adkisson
SMS
November 8, 2017

Our circadian rhythm, which regulates our heart rate and makes us tired, can also influence how well a wound heals — depending on the time of day the injury happened.

Disruption of this natural cycle is linked to sicknesses like cancer, diabetes, obesity and heart attacks. But researchers wanted to know how individual cells used the circadian clock to boost certain functions, like healing from a wound.

They found fibroblasts, the most common cells in connective tissue, worked faster to close open wounds during the active part of the circadian cycle, or when people were awake. When the cell hit its resting phase of the cycle — when people slept — wounds closed a lot slower.

American Scientists Win Nobel Prize For 'Biological Clock' Research

American Scientists Win Nobel Prize For 'Biological Clock' Research

Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young won this year's prize for discovering "molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm."

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Open wounds weren't the only injury that healed more quickly during the day. When researchers looked at historical data from the International Burn Injury Database, they found burn wounds sustained at night took about 60 percent longer to heal than daytime burns.

The study's authors said the new information might be useful for patients who are going to have surgery. If they can reset their cellular clocks before the procedure, they might recover more quickly.