An Endocrine Society Thematic Issue: Biological Rhythms 2022
July 2022
Read our special collection of journal articles, published in 2020-2022, focused on biological rhythms! Curation of the collection was guided by Altmetric Attention Scores and Featured Article designations.
Recent years have seen a huge increase in the research focus on rhythms, which are typically driven by interlinked biological clocks and influence a plethora of endocrine processes. Because disruption of the rhythms is linked to metabolic disease, increased understanding of them holds promise for treatments.
In Journal of the Endocrine Society, Greendale and coauthors report on melatonin patterns and levels during the human menstrual cycle. They find a late luteal melatonin rise, likely signaled by progesterone, that may influence cycle pacemaker control. In a prospective study, Levine and colleagues find an association between total urinary phytoestrogens, although not individual phytoestrogens, and shorter menstrual cycle length. Lenert and associates discover that in female mice, a high-fat diet led to an increase in time spent in proestrus and estrus, and an increase in serum progesterone during proestrus.
In Endocrinology, Brubaker and Martchenko survey a Basic Science Collection of mini-reviews about the circadian clock in metabolic homeostasis. One of the items in the collection, by Seshadri and Doucette, surveys literature about the role of the pancreatic islet/beta cell circadian clock in beta cell biology. Oosterman and colleagues discuss the idea that a desynchronization between tissue metabolic clocks, induced by shift work, contributes to insulin resistance.
In JCEM, Grant and colleagues report that healthy volunteers have a hypersensitive triglyceride response to ingested calories when they eat at night. Arredondo-Amador and coauthors likewise find a circadian sensitivity in hormone-sensitive lipase activity. And Gu and associates confirm that a late dinner induces nocturnal glucose intolerance and reduces fatty acid oxidation and mobilization.
Endocrine Reviews has an article by Kim and Lazar that reviews the transcriptional architecture of the mammalian circadian clock. Lightman and associates analyze the dynamics of cortisol secretion, which are affected by disease states, and the implications for mammalian biology. Manoogian and colleagues put such insights into practice in their account of how time-restricted eating can prevent or manage metabolic disease.
Journal of the Endocrine Society
Gail A Greendale, Paula Witt-Enderby, Arun S Karlamangla, Fahima Munmun, Sybil Crawford, MeiHua Huang, Nanette Santoro
This study confirms a late luteal melatonin rise, likely signaled by progesterone, which may influence menstrual cycle pacemaker control. Melatonin declined from premenopause to postmenopause. A high correlation between menopause transition stage and age precludes distinction between the influences of ovarian and chronological aging.
Lindsay D Levine, Keewan Kim, Alexandra Purdue-Smithe, Rajeshwari Sundaram, Enrique F Schisterman, Matthew Connell, Elizabeth A Devilbiss, Zeina Alkhalaf, Jeannie G Radoc, Germaine M Buck Louis, Sunni L Mumford
Phytoestrogens may influence fecundability, although biological mechanisms remain elusive. Since it is hypothesized that phytoestrogens may act through influencing hormone levels, we investigated associations between phytoestrogens and menstrual cycle length, a proxy for the hormonal milieu, in healthy women attempting pregnancy.
Melissa E Lenert, Micaela M Chaparro, Michael D Burton
The etiology of reproductive disorders correlates with weight gain in patients, but the link between reproduction, diet, and weight has been difficult to translate in rodents. As rates of childhood obesity and reproductive disorders increase, the need to study the effects of weight and diet on adolescent females is key.
Endocrinology
Patricia L Brubaker, Alexandre Martchenko
The use of positive- and negative-feedback signals, both hormonal and metabolic, between these tissues ensures that peripheral metabolic pathways are synchronized with the timing of food intake, thus optimizing nutrient disposition and preventing metabolic disease. Collectively, these articles highlight the critical role played by the circadian clock in maintaining metabolic homeostasis.
Nivedita Seshadri, Christine A Doucette
Beta cell dysfunction is central to the development of type 2 diabetes (T2D). In T2D, environmental and genetic influences can manifest beta cell dysfunction in many ways, including impaired glucose-sensing and secretion coupling mechanisms, insufficient adaptative responses to stress, and aberrant beta cell loss through increased cell death and/or beta cell de-differentiation.
Johanneke E Oosterman, Suzan Wopereis, Andries Kalsbeek
Obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D) have become a global health concern. The prevalence of obesity and T2D is significantly higher in shift workers compared to people working regular hours. An accepted hypothesis is that the increased risk for metabolic health problems arises from aberrantly timed eating behavior, that is, eating out of synchrony with the biological clock.
The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism
Leilah K Grant, Charles A Czeisler, Steven W Lockley, Shadab A Rahman
The time-of-day dependency on postprandial lipid metabolism, which leads to hypersensitivity in TG responses when eating at night, may underlie the dyslipidemia and elevated cardiovascular disease risk observed in shift workers.
María Arredondo-Amador, Carolina Zambrano, Agné Kulyté, Juán Luján, Kun Hu, Fermín Sánchez de Medina, Frank A J L Scheer, Peter Arner, Mikael Ryden, Olga Martínez-Augustin, Marta Garaulet
Fat mobilization in adipose tissue (AT) has a specific timing. However, circadian rhythms in the activity of the major enzyme responsible for fat mobilization, hormone-sensitive lipase (HSL), have not been demonstrated in humans.
Chenjuan Gu, Nga Brereton, Amy Schweitzer, Matthew Cotter, Daisy Duan, Elisabet Børsheim, Robert R Wolfe, Luu V Pham, Vsevolod Y Polotsky, Jonathan C Jun
Consuming calories later in the day is associated with obesity and metabolic syndrome. We hypothesized that eating a late dinner alters substrate metabolism during sleep in a manner that promotes obesity.
Endocrine Reviews
Yong Hoon Kim, Mitchell A Lazar
All biological processes, living organisms, and ecosystems have evolved with the Sun that confers a 24-hour periodicity to life on Earth. Circadian rhythms arose from evolutionary needs to maximize daily organismal fitness by enabling organisms to mount anticipatory and adaptive responses to recurrent light-dark cycles and associated environmental changes.
Stafford L Lightman, Matthew T Birnie, Becky L Conway-Campbell
The past decade has seen several critical advances in our understanding of hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis regulation. Homeostatic physiological circuits need to integrate multiple internal and external stimuli and provide a dynamic output appropriate for the response parameters of their target tissues.
Emily N C Manoogian, Lisa S Chow, Pam R Taub, Blandine Laferrère, Satchidananda Panda
Time-restricted feeding (TRF, animal-based studies) and time-restricted eating (TRE, humans) are an emerging behavioral intervention approach based on the understanding of the role of circadian rhythms in physiology and metabolism.