Circadian time structure of circulating plasma lipid peroxides, antioxidant enzymes and other small molecules in peptic ulcers.

Background: The circadian rhythm, as part of a broad time structure (chronome) of lipid peroxides and antioxidant defense mechanisms may relate to prevention, efficacy and management of preventive and curative chronotherapy.

Methods: Fifty newly diagnosed patients with peptic ulcers, 30-45 years of age, and 60 age-matched clinically healthy volunteers were synchronized for one week with diurnal activity from about 06:00 to about 22:00 and nocturnal rest. Breakfast was served around 08:30, lunch around 13:30 and dinner around 20:30.

Season's appreciations.

To follow the tradition set by the late Franz Halberg, highlights of research performed over the last year from his Minnesota Center are summarized. They illustrate the broad international cooperation enjoyed by his center and the diversity of applications of the discipline he founded. The results briefly summarized herein in the form of an annotated bibliography are a testimony that his legacy continues to live on and constitutes a tribute to his memory.

Chronobiologically Interpreted Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring in Health and Disease.

To detect vascular variability anomalies (VVAs), a blood pressure and heart rate profile around the clock for at least 7 days is a start. As a minimum, measurement every 60 or preferably 30 minutes for a week is needed, to be continued if abnormality is found, to assess the about 24-hour (circadian) variability that exists in all individuals. As a first dividend, one then also obtains a glimpse of 2 of the very many longer-than-circadian periodicities, the biological half-week and week.

Diagnosing vascular variability anomalies, not only MESOR-hypertension.

Chronobiology is the study of biological rhythms. Chronomics investigates interactions with environmental cycles in a genetically coded autoresonance of the biosphere with wrangling space and terrestrial weather. Analytical global and local methods applied to human blood pressure records of around-the-clock measurements covering decades detect physiological-physical interactions, a small yet measurable response to solar and terrestrial magnetism.

Decadal Cycles in the Human Cardiovascular System.

Seven of the eight authors of this report each performed physiologic self-surveillance, some around the clock for decades. We here document the presence of long cycles (decadals, including circaundecennians) in the time structure of systolic (S) and diastolic (D) blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR). Because of the non-stationary nature in time and space of these and other physiologic and environmental periodic components that, like the wind, can appear and disappear in a given or other geographic location at one or another time, they have been called "Aeolian".

Egeson's (George's) transtridecadal weather cycling and sunspots.

In the late 19th century, Charles Egeson, a map compiler at the Sydney Observatory, carried out some of the earliest research on climatic cycles, linking them to about 33-year cycles in solar activity, and predicted that a devastating drought would strike Australia at the turn of the 20th century. Eduard Brückner and William J. S.

Cugini's syndrome in statu nascendi. Oratio contra morem prevalentem et pro chronobiologica ratione ad pressione sanguinis curandam. A plea against the prevailing custom and in favor of a chronobiological approach to treating blood pressure.

An increase in the circadian amplitude (A) of blood pressure (BP) had been reported to precede a rise in the circadian BP average (MESOR, M), as pre-hypertension in the stroke-prone Okamoto rat. In humans, children with a positive family history of high BP and/or related cardiovascular disease had, on average, a larger BP-A than children with a negative family history, and an elevated BP-A was associated with intermediate values of the left ventricular mass index (LVMI), whereas an elevation in BP-M was only observed for larger LVMI values. Against this background, with 24-hour ambulatory monitoring (ABPM) interpreted chronobiologically, Pietro Cugini (University La Sapienza of Rome, Italy) has reported an elevation of both the circadian BP-M and BP-A as occurring with a minimal change (hypertensive) retinopathy.

Schedule shifts, cancer and longevity: good, bad or indifferent?

Prompted by a recent report of the possible carcinogenic effect of shiftwork focusing on the disruption of circadian rhythms, we review studies involving shifts in schedule implemented at varying intervals in unicells, insects and mammals, including humans. Results indicate the desirability to account for a broader-than-circadian view. They also suggest the possibility of optimizing schedule shifts by selecting intervals between consecutive shifts associated with potential side-effects such as an increase in cancer risk.

UNTREATED TRANSIENT LONGER THAN 7-DAY CHAT, CIRCADIAN HYPER-AMPLITUDE TENSION, IN A 7-YEAR PERSPECTIVE.

The case report presented herein aims at promoting the awareness in medical, notably cardiological, practice of the importance of, first, collecting at least a week-long record of around-the-clock measurements of blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) (and a much longer record if the 7 day record so indicates) and, second, of analysing the data chronobiologically in the light of reference values specified as a function of time, gender and age as a minimum. In addition to diagnosing deviations in a chronome (time structure)-adjusted mean value, a chronobiological approach identifies abnormalities in the variability of BP and/or HR, gauged by the circadian characteristics (double amplitude and acrophase, measures of the extent and timing of predictable change within a cycle) and by the standard deviation. A woman in presumably good health was 60 years of age at the start of intermittent monitoring over a 7 year span.

AMBULATORY BLOOD PRESSURE MONITORING: THE NEED OF 7-DAY RECORD.

The need for systematic around-the-clock self-measurements of blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR), or preferably for automatic monitoring as the need arises and can be met by inexpensive tools, is illustrated in two case reports. Miniaturized unobtrusive, as yet unavailable instrumentation for the automatic measurement of BP and HR should be a high priority for both government and industry. Automatic ambulatorily functioning monitors already represent great progress, enabling us to introduce the concept of eventually continuous or, as yet, intermittent home ABPM.

CHRONOMICS AND GENETICS.

The mapping of time structures, chronomes, constitutes an endeavor spawned by chronobiology: chronomics. This cartography in time shows signatures on the surface of the earth, cycles, also accumulating in life on the earth's surface. We append a glossary of these and other cycles, the names being coined in the light of approximate cycle length.

Chronomics, neuroendocrine feedsidewards and the recording and consulting of nowcasts--forecasts of geomagnetics.

A multi-center four-hourly sampling of many tissues for 7 days (00:00 on April 5-20:00 to April 11, 2004), on rats standardized for 1 month in two rooms on antiphasic lighting regimens happened to start on the day after the second extremum of a moderate double magnetic storm gauged by the planetary geomagnetic Kp index (which at each extremum reached 6.3 international [arbitrary] units) and by an equatorial index Dst falling to -112 and -81 nT, respectively, the latter on the first day of the sampling. Neuroendocrine chronomes (specifically circadian time structures) differed during magnetically affected and quiet days.

Incidence of sudden cardiac death, myocardial infarction and far- and near-transyears.

We analyzed cycles with periods, tau, in the range of 0.8-2.0 years, characterizing, mostly during 1999-2003, the incidence of sudden cardiac death (SCD), according to the International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision (ICD10), code I46.

Chronomics of circulating plasma lipid peroxides and anti-oxidant enzymes and other related molecules in cirrhosis of liver. In the memory of late Shri Chetan Singh.

Background: The chronome (from chronos, time, and nomos, rule; time structure) of lipid peroxidation and anti-oxidant defense mechanisms may relate to the efficacy and management of preventive and curative chronotherapy.

Patients And Methods: Thirty patients with liver cirrhosis, 25-45 years of age, and 60 age-matched clinically healthy volunteers were synchronized for 1 week with diurnal activity from about 06:00 to about 22:00 and nocturnal rest. Breakfast was around 08:30, lunch around 13:30 and dinner around 20:30.

Chronomics affirm extending scope of lead in phase of duodenal vs. pineal circadian melatonin rhythms.

In Göttingen, Germany, circadian variations in melatonin had been determined time-macroscopically in pineal glands, blood plasma and duodenum of chicken and rats. When these data were meta-analyzed, they agreed with the results from an independent survey on tissues from rats collected in a laboratory in Pécs, Hungary. In the latter study, tissues were analyzed chemically in Bratislava, Slovakia, and numerically in Minneapolis, MN, USA, all by single- and multiple-component cosinor and parameter tests.

Prokaryotic and eukaryotic unicellular chronomics.

An impeccable time series, published in 1930, consisting of hourly observations on colony advance in a fluid culture of E. coli, was analyzed by a periodogram and power spectrum in 1961. While the original senior author had emphasized specifically periodicity with no estimate of period length, he welcomed further analyses.

Chronoastrobiology: proposal, nine conferences, heliogeomagnetics, transyears, near-weeks, near-decades, phylogenetic and ontogenetic memories.

"Chronoastrobiology: are we at the threshold of a new science? Is there a critical mass for scientific research?" A simple photograph of the planet earth from outer space was one of the greatest contributions of space exploration. It drove home in a glance that human survival depends upon the wobbly dynamics in a thin and fragile skin of water and gas that covers a small globe in a mostly cold and vast universe. This image raised the stakes in understanding our place in that universe, in finding out where we came from and in choosing a path for survival.

Melatonin, refractory hypertension, myocardial ischemia and other challenges in nightly blood pressure lowering.

A test of the relative merits of timed melatonin for the treatment of cardiac ischemia as well as hypertension refractory to other drugs is documented against the background of earlier chronobiological studies on blood pressure (BP), disease risks, circadian hyper-amplitude-tension and melatonin effects broadly.

No baseline for blood pressure in ordinary life: another case of transient chronome alterations.

Half-hourly systolic (S) and diastolic (D) blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) monitoring with gaps demonstrates transient elevations of unknown origin of the chronome (time structure)-adjusted mean, the MESOR, M, of BP, and of the circadian double amplitude of BP of TS, a clinically healthy-appearing engineering student who was 27 years of age at the start of the study. An assessment of large and small arterial vessel elasticity was in keeping with no detection of functional or structural alteration in her vasculature. The recovery of normality in BP endpoints at the time of this report is speculatively associated with a weight loss of 40 pounds and the formation of a friendship by correspondence.