Endocrine Abstracts

Sleep curtailment has become a common behavior in industrialized countries. Simultaneously, the aging of the population is associated with an increased prevalence of sleep disturbances. These trends for shorter sleep duration and poorer sleep quality have developed over the same time period as the dramatic increase in the prevalence of obesity and diabetes. There is recent evidence to indicate that chronic partial sleep loss and decreased sleep quality may increase the risk of...

Circadian rhythms are a ubiquitous feature in living organisms. They are not just a passive response to daily cyclic fluctuations in the environment, but are instead driven by endogenous and self-sustained clocks. More than 40 years ago, the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus was identified as the location of an endogenous circadian clock driving internal rhythmicity and this SCN oscillator was long thought to be the only mammalian clock, functioning as a master...