After 15 days of treatment with pasireotide, 76% of patients with Cushing’s disease experienced a decrease in urinary free cortisol levels.... Safety analysis revealed that pasireotide was well tolerated; the most common adverse events were gastrointestinal disorders (54%), such as diarrhea (44%), nausea (23%) and abdominal pain (18%).
...It turns out that many of the cells throughout our bodies have an intrinsic circadian clock mechanism and that jet lag and shift work can produce internal asynchrony between each of our tissue-specific clocks.
Our brains, on a daily basis, generate the hormonal and neuronal signals that influence the cellular clocks in the peripheral tissues. If this communication line is disrupted, the liver, for example, ends up on one time zone, and the brain on another.
These peripheral clocks in the body's organ systems cannot themselves receive information directly. To know what time of day it is in relation to the external environment, these tissues depend on signals originating in the suprachiasmatic nucleus: every day the brain sends signals that inform the peripheral cells to adjust the phase of their rhythms, like the pin of a wrist watch being moved a little bit forward or backward.
If we could somehow tinker with this system in the adult human, it might be possible to reduce the effects of jet-lag and shift work by rapidly adjusting our internal clock. Duffield and the team of researchers may have uncovered an important target for such remedies by identifying the Id2 gene, which appears to in some way regulate the magnitude of response of the circadian clock to light signals.
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