Melatonin needs work. Some comments from Talk, Archive 3:
When this article someday is reorganized, which I think it needs, I'd suggest adding a History section. Some research into the media hysteria about this miracle drug, starting about early-1990s, would be appropriate. A brief timeline telling what was known, when, about melatonin would be interesting. I'm parking a couple of facts and links here.
Newsweek's cover on melatonin, 1995, might be a good illustration.
Melatonin was named by its "discoverer" in 1958; before that it was referred to as "(bovine) pineal gland extracts". Here is a link (PDF) to Dr. Aaron Bunson Lerner's first paper about it where the word melatonin is used. Dr. Lerner was then the (first) director of Yale's Department of Dermatology. Here is Lerner's NYT obit from February 2007; he died at age 86. (UPI's obit contains an error, as Lerner's work was on the pigmentation of frog skin, not human skin.)
If taken several hours before bedtime according to the phase response curve (PRC) for melatonin, it merely advances the phase of melatonin production. If taken 30 to 90 minutes before bedtime, it advances the period of melatonin's presence in the blood. 91.132.224.196 (talk) 09:08, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
The text you cite is from the section Safety of supplementation (with a {citation needed} tag at the end of the paragraph), while the explanation of the function(s) is/should be in the section Current and potential medical indications: Treatment of circadian rhythm disorders. Both need some reworking, which I'll get at and I'll find the missing citation (to Phyllis Zee et al, if I remember correctly).
PDF: Melatonin in paedatric sleep disorders Six pages + references. London New Drugs Group, January 2008. Found through a search at: NHS Evidence. "Systematic reviews and meta-analyses" etc. - Hordaland (talk) 09:23, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
Unlike numerous articles on the subject, this article was leaning very strongly (suspiciously) towards only selling the over the counter drug. The article suggested that there is nothing you can eat that will significantly increase melatonin levels. (This has been debated and the article should have revealed this). Nor did it explicitly suggest anything else people can do (other than swallow medication) to affect levels such as sunlight upon waking or explicitly stating that simply darkening a room may do the trick. Not that there was not some great information here; it is just that it all led to "the fact" that the only thing we can rationally do is "buy now!" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.233.128.12 (talk) 10:49, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, announced through a press release in December 2007 that shiftwork that involves circadian disruption is “probably carcinogenic to humans”.
They reviewed epidemiological studies of long-term female night shiftworkers and noted a higher risk of breast cancer risk than those who did not work at night. These studies have involved mainly nurses and flight attendants. Animal studies had similar results where light at night significantly increased tumours. This relates to melatonin in that studies reducing levels of this hormone at night increased the tumours.
The IARC committee head noted that nearly 20% of the working population in Europe and North America are engaged in shiftwork, with many workers in health-care and transportation fiels as well as in industrial, communications, and hospitality sectors. Studies focussed on breast cancer in nurses and flight attendants.
70.51.93.236 (talk) 00:16, 24 February 2008 (UTC)Lorraine Davison70.51.93.236 (talk) 00:16, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
File:Babel Barnstar by paul klenk.jpg
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|style="vertical-align: middle; border-top: 1px solid gray;" | First barnstar I've ever given, and so well-deserved. On top of all your other great work for Wikipedia, the translation project is monumental. Kudos!
Hordaland (talk) 05:34, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
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