And I'm leaving on a jet plane...



You've just staggered off a 12-hour flight. The clock says it's dawn, but your body says it's bedtime. You can't remember what day it is nor do you really care.


The fuzzy, queasy sensation of jet lag has sometimes been likened to having your brain gently squeezed - and now, a researcher in Britain says that feeling has scientific backing.

Kwangwook Cho, of the University of Bristol Medical School, found that chronic jet lag appears to shrink the frontal part of the brain, inflicting temporary loss of memory and cognitive skills. He studied 20 women flight attendants aged between 22 and 28 who had worked for at least five years for an airline and routinely flew across at least seven time zones. Women were chosen for the test because they generally suffered worse jet lag than men.

Cho carried out a scan of each woman, using magnetic resonance imaging, which provides a 3-D image of the brain, and assessed their performance in tests. Among the women had a short turnaround in flights, an area of the brain called the right temporal lobe was "significantly smaller" than women who had the 14-day turnaround.