夜食综合征确实存在

People woken at night by insatiable hunger may have their genes² to blame, research suggests. 研究发现，半夜因饥饿醒过来的人可能要怪他们的基因了。   Night-eating syndrome³ may appear when the genes that synchronise⁴ eating patterns with sleep are faulty, research on mice concluded.   This alters meal times, leading to over-eating and weight gain.   About 1-2% of people have the condition. Signs include waking in the night and being unable to go back to sleep without eating.   The syndrome has recently been classified as an eating disorder⁵, but the cause is unknown.   The food consumed is often unhealthy and high in calories, leading to weight gain and sometimes obesity⁶.   The study, published in Cell Reports, looked at mice bred with a human version of a body-clock gene¹ in place of the mouse one.   When the gene was silenced, the mice ate much earlier than normal ones, when they should have been asleep.   Mutations in a related body-clock gene - implicated⁷ in sleep disorders⁸ - led to the mice sleeping more.   The researchers think the genes work together to keep eating and sleeping synchronised.   A fault in either gene causes disruption in sleeping and eating patterns.   "For a long time, people discounted night-eating syndrome as not real," said lead researcher Satchidananda Panda, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, US.   "It opens up a whole lot of future questions about how these cycles are regulated."