Jet Lag May Trigger Mental Illness Relapse

[G_j]

something else to consider:

http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/37/9/29

Clinical & Research News


Jet Lag May Trigger Mental Illness Relapse

Joan Arehart-Treichel

Taking long airplane flights may reactivate psychiatric illnesses, an Israeli study suggests.

Anybody who has experienced jet lag knows that it can be a real downer, leading to fatigue, grouchiness, or simply being out of sorts. But for persons with psychiatric illness, jet lag may pose an extra threat as well: reactivation of their mental illness.

This study finding comes from Gregory Katz, M.D., and colleagues of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center in Jerusalem, Israel, and is reported in the January-February issue of Comprehensive Psychiatry.

The Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center is unique in that nearly all international visitors to Jerusalem who experience psychiatric emergencies are sent there. Also, nearly all those visitors arrived in Israel by air. Thus Katz and his colleagues decided that their patient population was such that it would allow them to explore scientifically a question that has been scarcely probed up to now: Is there any link between jet lag and psychiatric illness?

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"The results of our study," they concluded in their study report, "indicate a connection between relapse of existing psychotic or affective disorders and jet lag."

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