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 Researchers analyzed more than 46,000 Major League Baseball games
played over the course of 20 years - from 1992 until 2011 - and saw
the home-field advantage disappear when the home team traveled two
time zones east and the away team visited from the same time zone.
“We all know intuitively from experience what it means to be
jet-lagged,” said senior researcher Dr. Ravi Allada, a circadian
rhythms expert and neurobiology professor at Northwestern University
in Evanston, Illinois.
“We all know it will impact our own performance,” he said in a phone
interview. “I think we showed very specifically what it is.”
Pitchers – on both home and away teams – gave up more home runs when
they presumably suffered jet lag as a result of traveling through
two time zones, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Jet-lagged home-team pitchers allowed enough home runs to negate
their home-field advantage, Allada said.
Prior studies have shown that eastward travel is more likely to
desynchronize internal clocks than westward travel, the authors
write. The new study confirmed that eastward travel was more likely
to alter baseball players’ performance.
Surprisingly, when both teams were jet-lagged, the offense for
eastbound jet-lagged home teams suffered more than the offense of
jet-lagged away teams, the study showed. The eastward-traveling home
teams ran and stole fewer bases, batted in fewer doubles and triples
and hit more double plays, the analysis found.
Allada hypothesized that traveling players may follow stricter
schedules, which could help them recover faster from jet lag, than
players on the home team. Baseball players also may have more
responsibilities and obligations when they are at home and less time
to adjust their clocks, he said.
When games are two time zones or more away, coaches should consider
having their starting pitchers fly a day or two before games to
adjust their clocks to the local environment, Allada said.
The same advice could apply to athletes on other sports teams as
well as to travelers in other professions, including military
pilots, Allada said. A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
grant partly funded the study.
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After staying up late and sleeping in over the weekend, adolescents
face similar disruptions to their circadian rhythms on Monday
mornings if they must rise at 6 a.m. and take tests at 8 a.m., said
Dr. Asha Singh, medical director of the Sleep Disorder Program at
Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.
People who work night and graveyard shifts also must adjust their
clocks. Exposing themselves to bright lights and taking supplements
containing melatonin, a naturally secreted hormone, a few hours
before bedtime can help, Singh said in a phone interview. She was
not involved with the new study.
The new research replicates what she’s seen in patients in the sleep
lab, she said.
Eating at regular intervals and exercising earlier in the day also
can help regulate circadian rhythms, Singh said.
Nighttime exercise delays the release of melatonin, which is
necessary to go to sleep. “You want to make sure you’re not asking
your players to do that,” she said.
Light and genetics are the most powerful factors, she said.
“It’s genetic how easily you’re able to shift,” she said. “It’s
actually encoded in your DNA, even in fruit flies.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2jRTj1V Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, online January 23, 2017.
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