A new tablet is being developed for travellers to beat the dreaded ‘jet lag’.
The tablet is designed to work by resetting the body’s internal clock, making it easier for people to adjust to another time zone, and therfore beating ‘jet lag’.
The current research is focused on fine-tuning the “ticking” of the biological clock.
Researcher Professor Andrew Loudon, of Manchester University, said his team had discovered that it could control one of the key modules involved in setting the speed at which the clock ticks, and could subsequently help kick it into a new rhythm.
Experiments on mice showed the drug blocking the enzyme and restarting clocks that had stopped ticking, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported.
The study has been described as the first to challenge the “core” of the body clock.
Jet lag typically affects people travelling on journeys which involve moving across more than three time zones.
Eastward journeys, such as those to Asia, tend to be more problematic than westward trips, as the body finds it harder to adjust to a shorter day, than a longer one.
Previous studies into ‘jet lag’ proposed that travelling on an empty stomach could help beat ‘jet lag’, with US researchers suggesting that not eating at all while in the air would help fool the body’s rhythms into adjusting faster into a new time zone.
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