Drug Use Resets Your Body Clock

It is common knowledge that drinking and partying can really put a dent in the amount and quality of your sleep, but a new study shows how drug use may do this as well. This study, published in a recent issue of Psychopharmacology, shows that taking one or two pills of ecstasy can cause long lasting damage to your ‘body clock.’ It is obvious that the drug would disrupt your sleep in some way because it is a stimulant, but this new research shows that taking only one hit of ecstasy can cause lifetime sleep problems. Researchers injected lab animals with the equivalent of one to two ecstasy pills and then examined how the rat’s body clock genes changed. It was found that the ecstasy caused changes in the Per1 and Per2 genes in the rats.

Source: ABC Science