We live in an era where we are constantly exposed to artificial light: from the home, public lighting, television and smartphone screens.
This could come at a serious and worrying cost, as new researchers prove that continuous exposure to light could have negative consequences on the human body.
On this occasion, an experiment was carried out on guinea pigs, where a team of Danish researchers tried to find out the reactions of mice when they are taken out of the day/night routine and subjected to continuous light. More than 130 guinea pigs were involved in the study.
"Our study shows that the environmental light-dark cycle is important for health. We showed that the absence of environmental rhythms leads to severe disruption of a wide variety of health parameters."
said neurologist Johanna Meijer from the Leiden Medical University Center in Denmark.
To deepen the studies and to find out how harmful exposure to continuous light is, Meijer and his team exposed laboratory mice to constant light for 24 weeks, measuring the animals' response to continuous light.
The continuous light for almost half a year made him lose muscle and bone mass, immune system disorders and signs of osteoporosis appeared. Therefore, continuous light accelerates the aging process, because all the psychological effects present are specific to an advanced age.
"The good news is that we subsequently showed that these negative effects on health are reversible when the environmental light-dark cycle is restored"
The researchers also examined the animals' brains and discovered a break in the rat's circadian rhythm, a fact that would have caused health degradation, including the loss of a third of the bone volume.
After two weeks of resuming the day/night process, the negative effects of constant light began to disappear.
"We used to think of light and darkness as harmless or neutral stimuli with respect to health. We now realize this is not the case... Possibly this is not surprising as life evolved under the constant pressure of the light-dark cycle. We seem to be optimized to live under these cycles, and the other side of the coin is that we are now affected by a lack of such cycles."
On this occasion, we should remind ourselves how important it is to observe the light/dark routine, which many neglect during night shifts or when they stay late into the night with their noses in the computer and/or smartphone.
