Damn I knew I should have taken the package!!
I wonder if they use elderly rats when they do studies on management?
Jetlagged mice die, US study find.
Tuesday Dec 26 16:51 AEDT
A study that exposed elderly mice to the ravages of regular long-haul flights found most of them died.
The University of Virginia study showed a majority of older mice died while being subjected to the equivalent of a Washington to Paris flight once a week for eight weeks, The Washington Post reported.
More intense forms of jetlag sped up the death rate in the elderly rodents, the study found.
Experts say the study is one of the first hard scientific looks into the health effects of jetlag.
Younger mice seemed to rebound more quickly and were not immediately harmed by the jetlag.
Simulated jetlag conditions were created by advancing and delaying the rodent's exposure to light.
But researchers aren't sure what conclusions to draw from the results, the newspaper said.
Gene Block, the report's co-author, said older mice might be more susceptible to sudden light changes than younger mice. Or, he said, jetlag might be a health problem that builds up in younger subjects, causing future maladies.
To further explore the issue, his researchers have launched another set of tests to determine whether jetlag causes long-term health consequences in younger and middle-age rodents, Block said.
Block's study also hinted at what flyers have been saying for years - it's more difficult to adjust to time zone changes when flying east.
The researchers found 53 per cent of elderly mice died when they were subjected to a simulated weekly flight from Washington to Paris over the eight-week study.
The death rate dropped to 32 per cent of elderly mice on a simulated Paris to Washington route, according to the study, which was published last month in the journal Current Biology.
Seventeen per cent of the mice in a control group died in the eight-week study.
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