Night owls who are involuntarily unable to fall asleep for several hours after a normal time may have delayed sleep phase disorder. 1630) by Matthias StomĪ night owl, evening person or simply owl, is a person who tends to stay up until late at night, or to the very early hours of the morning. Next, 23andMe plans to combine its data with that of a research charity called UK BioBank, to look for even stronger genetic patterns.A Young Man Reading by Candlelight (c. Societal pressures like work and family life also play important roles. Of course, genetics isn't the only factor that determines when you wake up. Hinds added that simple questions "can be very effective for genetic studies, where the most important consideration for study power is the. Hinds admitted that the study's survey method "might modestly reduce the power of the study," but that this "should not materially bias the findings or lead to false results." For example, "If you ask individuals whether they are morning people or evening people, a late-type who is forced into an early schedule by work may regard themselves as a morning type," Brandstaetter said.Īlso, the researchers didn't include data on people who are somewhere in between a morning person and a night owl, which may make up close to half of all people, he added. Simply asking someone if they're a morning person may not lead to an accurate answer. The study had one important limitation, however - it was based on people's answers to a single question ("are you a morning or an evening person?"), instead of more objective scientific questionnaires, Roland Brandstaetter, a biologist who studies sleep cycles at the University of Birmingham in the UK and was not involved in the study, told Business Insider. Looks like most of the early birds are in New Mexico and New Hampshire, while the night owls are in New York (not surprsingly), Kentucky, North Dakota and Nebraska: Here's a map based on a random sample of people who agreed to take part in 23andMe's research, which shows the percentage of early risers in every state. The self-reported night owls in the study were also more likely to have depression, but again, the researchers couldn't show that being a night owl causes depression or vice versa. However, there was one gene they found to be more common in evening people, known as the FTO gene, which has been linked to obesity. The scientists also noted that people who identified as morning people tended to have a lower body mass index (BMI) than night owls, but they weren't able to show that one caused the other. By contrast, self-described morning people were less likely to need more than 8 hours of sleep, to sleep soundly, to sweat while sleeping, or to sleep walk. Compared with morning people, people who self-identified as night owls (while not a truly objective measure) were almost twice as likely to suffer from insomnia and about two-thirds as likely to have been diagnosed with sleep apnea, a sleep disorder that causes you to repeatedly stop breathing while you sleep. And people over 60 (63.1%) were much more likely to prefer mornings than people under 30 (24.2%), which fits with previous research that found older people tend to rise earlier.īut that's not all. For example, more women (48.4%) than men (39.7%) said they were morning people. The findings revealed all sorts of interesting patterns. The close proximity of these genes suggests they are likely to have related functions - specifically, telling us when to be awake. And some of these genes were also near ones involved in sensing light from our eyes. Of the 15 genetic variants the study found that were linked to being a morning person, seven of them were near genes that are known to play a role in circadian rhythms. The researchers didn't include people who said they had no preference or people who gave different answers on the two surveys. Of the more than 135,000 people who answered at least one survey, 75.5% fell into the category of morning or night persons. The participants also filled out two online surveys that asked whether they considered themselves a morning person or a night owl. They studied a group of more than 89,283 people who submitted their DNA to 23andMe via spit samples - the standard way 23andMe runs its tests. In this study, 23andMe's principle researcher David Hinds and his colleagues have done what's called a genome-wide association study (GWAS), where they looked at many different versions, or variants, of a gene to determine if any of them were linked to a specific trait - in this case, being a morning or evening person.
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