Aging Chronobiome Study

We invite you to participate in a research study where we explore how young and old people differ in their behavioral and biological rhythms. The main criteria to qualify as a research subject are: 1.) you are apparent healthy, 2.) you own a smartphone and 3.) you are either between 18-30 years or 55-75 years old.

Several decades of research have found out that how well we function very much depends on how much we are in harmony with our own preferences and our environment. This harmony is acutely disturbed when you travel quickly across several time zones, because suddenly your body’s physiology is still following your departure time but your arrival time tells your body something different. As a result, travelers often experience sleep problems and indigestion, which usually disappear after a couple of days. This is different in long-term shift workers for whom work outside of the typical daylight hours means that they have a higher risk for diseases including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer.

Intriguingly, more and more studies suggest that time of day matters how effective drugs work and how many side effects one might experience. To study this we started to describe the human chronobiome, which foremost looks at time of day differences of a person’s physiology, for example, in our small pilot study we saw a difference in break down products, or metabolites, between mornings and evenings. Now, in this present study, we wish to extend our understanding how the human chronobiome differs between healthy men and women, healthy young and old and how it reacts to a fatty meal challenge.

This knowledge will help us to say when a finding can still be considered normal or maybe indicates a first sign of disease. The novelty of our approach is that we measure long enough to understand the role of time of day for your chronobiome, that we measure many things to obtain a comprehensive representation of your chronobiome, that every measure is timestamped, and that we ask you to eat fatty meals to see how your chronobiome changes