DSPS sleep disorder

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actually, the article that made me look into it and discover DPSD talks about a study they did about training astronauts for the longer day on Mars. One of the things I noticed is they said people have a variation from the 24 hr day, some less, some more. Hers' the article; I found it on MSNBC

By Maggie Fox

Updated: 8:42 p.m. ET May 14, 2007
WASHINGTON - An experiment aimed at finding ways to help astronauts adapt to life on Mars could end up helping insomniacs on Earth, researchers said Monday.

They found that two 45-minute exposures to bright light in the evening could help people adjust to a longer, Martian-style day.

During the experiment, they found a wider-than-expected variation in an internal system the human body uses to keep track of days and nights, and they believe their treatment might help people with certain disorders of this system.

“The results have powerful implications for the treatment of circadian rhythm sleep disorders, including shift work disorder and advanced sleep phase disorder,” said Dr. Charles Czeisler, chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

NASA had asked Czeisler’s lab to find ways to help astronauts adjust to life on Mars, where the days are about 24 hours and 39 minutes long, or 24.65 hours.

This nearly 25-hour day is enough to throw most people into a state of jet lag, which Czeisler has shown interferes with the ability to learn, remember things, react quickly and to sleep.

His team tested 12 healthy volunteers aged 22 to 33 who had kept a regular eight-hour sleep and 16-hour wakeful schedule at home for at least three weeks.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they said the natural range of circadian days in just their group was from 23.47 to 24.48 hours per day — a full hour’s difference.

Tests on animals has shown there is a natural variation. Daylight tweaks the genetically determined circadian rhythm.

“In virtually all cases, the exposure that we get to light ... keeps us in sync with the 24-hour day,” Czeisler said in a telephone interview.

But what “astounded” Czeisler was an additional difference in hormone release.

They took blood from these volunteers every hour and found that people with the shorter internal clock released the sleep hormone melatonin four to five hours before their usual bedtimes, while those with unusually long internal days did not release melatonin until about an hour before bedtime.

Yes, this particular chronic pattern describes how I naturally function.

Could never adjust to school, early morning activity, or uniform schedules. Am a "night owl" much more often than I am a "morning lark". Can think of many reasons for my "sleep habits", but unsure whether my brain just came up with them (after-the-fact) to explain my unconscious behavior to myself. Fortunate to finally be able to follow my body's imperatives/directives, and do what I need when I need to do it-eat, sleep, all that. Never been able to hold regular job, got SSI (after dx) & now I go to one-on-one counseling appts. on weekly basis. From time to time over the years I've charted my hours, just to see how strangely cyclical my sleep/wake times were. In general, I go to bed & get up an hour later each/every day/night. Can hold the times still at certain comfortable/convenient levels, such as sleeping during the day & being up at night. Only for few days, though-then I get all out of whack & have to let the cycle advance. So there are times when I'm awake for "normal business hours" & asleep at same "normal time" as most others, depending on "when I'm at"-which continues to be unpredictable.

This describes me so well; I'd very vaguely heard of it. Thanks for the link. I'm on disability, and for the most part like being the 'night owl' that I am most of each month, so I'm really not at all motivated to change it, though my docs would like me to. It is very interesting that sleep disorders occur so much with people in the autistic spectrum. I wonder if it really happens more with us, or if we just have more trouble making the adjustments than NTs do? Given the fact that there's research showing circadian rhythms tend to run about 25 hours.

Are we all from another planet?