Timeshifter publishes report on the importance of timing in healthcare

NEW YORK – Timeshifter, a company focused on circadian technology and known for its jet lag app, has published a new report titled "Why Timing Matters in Healthcare." The report, authored by Dr. Steven W. Lockley, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Timeshifter, was released in conjunction with Circadian Awareness Day, an initiative aimed at increasing awareness of the profound influence of circadian rhythms on human health.

The report argues that while medicine has excelled at measurement and prescription over the past century, it has largely overlooked the critical role of timing in relation to biological clocks. A systematic review of over 100 clinical trials spanning fifty years found that approximately three-quarters of these studies were significantly impacted by the time of day. These findings spanned common conditions including high blood pressure, asthma, arthritis, and cancer. Examples cited include older adults producing more antibodies from a morning flu vaccine compared to an afternoon one, a common cholesterol drug proving more effective when taken at night, and heart-valve surgery patients experiencing less heart-muscle injury when operated on in the afternoon.

The report also advocates for "chronodiagnostics," the concept that a single test result, such as a cortisol or cholesterol reading, holds different implications depending on the biological time it was taken. With individual circadian rhythms varying by up to eight hours across a population, the same 8 a.m. blood draw or medication dose can represent a fundamentally different biological moment from one person to the next, a gap that clinical medicine has yet to systematically address.

Circadian Awareness Day, observed annually on July 24, aims to highlight the pervasive impact of circadian rhythms on sleep, alertness, metabolism, and immune function. The initiative also seeks to counter misinformation surrounding circadian-related challenges like jet lag and shift work disruption. "Timing is not a footnote to healthcare — it may be one of the most overlooked levers we have for making existing treatments work better, for more people, at lower cost," said Mickey Beyer-Clausen, Co-Founder and CEO of Timeshifter.

Dr. Lockley stated that tools to model and measure circadian phase are becoming faster and cheaper. "Once a clinician can check a patient's circadian time as easily as their blood pressure, we will be able to read every test result in the right biological context and time every drug, vaccine, and procedure to when it will do the most good and the least harm," he said.