Hamster Attack: After being rudely awakened during the day, Robo hamster Kahlua took a serious dislike to my camera (Ian O'Neill/Discovery News)
Next time you take that trans-continental flight, spare a thought for the hamsters that have undergone a series of sleep pattern tests.
The rodents took the equivalent of 10 flights from New York to Paris in one month. No, these aren't jet-setting hamsters, they just had their sleeping habits shifted by six hours every three days for a month during a study at the University of California, Berkeley. This meant their sleeping patterns were completely out-of-sync with the day-night cycle.
This might sound like torture, but the little fuzzballs have helped scientists understand how the time shift associated with long distance travel impacts the human brain.
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It's a well-known fact that time-zone adjustment after flying long distances can have detrimental effects on mood and sleeping patterns. However, for frequent fliers, jet-lag is more than just a short period of grogginess.
According to Berkeley's Erin Gibson, co-author of the hamster research presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego this week, individuals that frequently change their sleeping habits exhibit higher rates of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer.
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Personally, I find it excruciating when I fly to the UK from Los Angeles several times a year to visit my family -- I can't sleep, I feel irritable and I notice I have problems concentrating for several days after the trip (plus I have cravings for pizza, but I suspect that might be an entirely different issue).
Of course, these symptoms are purely anecdotal, but this team of hamsters may have provided a glimpse at what physically happens to the brain after repeatedly shifting time-zones for a month. This in turn can help us understand how to mitigate the worst health complications in humans caused by shifting sleeping patterns.
Sure enough, according to Gibson, the jet-lagged hamsters exhibited a 50 percent decrease in the number of new neurons being born in the hippocampus -- an area of the brain that governs the formation of long-term memory.
Their mental function suffered too, resulting in the little critters getting confused as to which compartment in their habitat the most desirable exercise wheel was.
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28 days after the jet lag test, the hamsters still suffered learning and memory problems. The mismatch between the hamsters' internal body clock and the external environment "is having a long-term effect on learning and memory," Gibson said.
So far, it is unclear as to what is causing the cognitive problems, but variations in the sleep hormone melatonin, stress and increased cell death are all possibilities.
As a proud hamster owner myself (meet Kahlua, the Roborovski hamster, also pictured top), I know hamsters are creatures of habit. They are nocturnal and very sensitive to changes in their environment.
But as I watch Kahlua run around her habitat at my desk, pouches filled with seeds desperately trying to find her 'secret' food stash, I have to wonder about her mental function without any jet lag tests.
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