Systematic review of light exposure impact on human circadian rhythm

Leena Tähkämö, T. Partonen, A. Pesonen • 10/12/2018

Abstract

ABSTRACT Light is necessary for life, and artificial light improves visual performance and safety, but there is an increasing concern of the potential health and environmental impacts of light. Findings from a number of studies suggest that mistimed light exposure disrupts the circadian rhythm in humans, potentially causing further health impacts. However, a variety of methods has been applied in individual experimental studies of light-induced circadian impacts, including definition of light exposure and outcomes. Thus, a systematic review is needed to synthesize the results. In addition, a review of the scientific evidence on the impacts of light on circadian rhythm is needed for developing an evaluation method of light pollution, i.e., the negative impacts of artificial light, in life cycle assessment (LCA). The current LCA practice does not have a method to evaluate the light pollution, neither in terms of human health nor the ecological impacts. The systematic literature survey was conducted by searching for two concepts: light and circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm was searched with additional terms of melatonin and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. The literature search resulted to 128 articles which were subjected to a data collection and analysis. Melatonin secretion was studied in 122 articles and REM sleep in 13 articles. The reports on melatonin secretion were divided into studies with specific light exposure (101 reports), usually in a controlled laboratory environment, and studies of prevailing light conditions typical at home or work environments (21 studies). Studies were generally conducted on adults in their twenties or thirties, but only very few studies experimented on children and elderly adults. Surprisingly many studies were conducted with a small sample size: 39 out of 128 studies were conducted with 10 or less subjects. The quality criteria of studies for more profound synthesis were a minimum sample size of 20 subjects and providing detai...

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