Project description
Why night owls face a hidden health risk
Some people naturally rise with the sun, others come alive at night. These innate preferences, known as circadian types, shape our sleep, alertness, and even hormone cycles. But ‘evening types’ face a hidden cost: they’re more likely to develop health problems, from childhood into adulthood. With this in mind, the ERC-funded ChronoHealth project will investigate why this is the case. Is biology to blame? Or is it our modern world, rigid school and work hours, forcing night owls into a rhythm that doesn’t fit? Drawing on an exceptional mix of genetic, behavioural and environmental data from early childhood to old age, ChronoHealth aims to untangle how lifestyle, environment, and genetics interact to shape long-term health.
Objective
Individuals differ in daily timing of sleepwake behavior, alertness, body temperature, cardiovascular functions and hormonal secretion, having innately different circadian types from morningness to eveningness. Evening-types show poorer health already since childhood with increasing severity of health issues at adulthood with major impact on performance/wellbeing and health care burden. However, it is largely unknown WHY health issues accumulate to evening-types. It is likely that underlying factors for health differences between circadian types include interplay between biological, behavioral and environmental factors. Project uses large population-based longitudinal and cross-sectional data across life span from early childhood to old age linked to national register data, including wellbeing and health surveys, objective circadian assessment, health measurements and genetic data. I will study which environmental, behavioral and biological factors influence circadian rhythms and their disturbances throughout life span and how these moderate/mediate the association between circadian type and health/wellbeing outcomes. Focus during early childhood will be in somatic and cognitive development, during adolescence in school adjustment, life habits and somatic/mental wellbeing, and during adulthood in disorders, hospital treatments, and mortality. I will examine the role of genetic predisposition, family/school/work/social environment, life habits and behavioral schedules. Besides the unique and versatile data available for the research, novel objective tools for assessing circadian misalignment is developed in the project. Along with my expertise on circadian research, this project has versatile data and statistical power to sort out whether health issues among evening-types are more due to biological liability, such as genetic risk, or due to e.g. higher risk for circadian desynchronization as behavioral and societal schedules are in mismatch with the innate rhythms.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
00014 HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Finland
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