In the end of 2019, a novel coronavirus named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) caused an outbreak of pneumonia and a pandemic throughout the world. On February 2020, WHO named the disease Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). In a report of more than 370,000 cases of COVID-19, cough (50%), fever (43%), myalgia (36%), and headache (34%) were the most common presenting symptoms(Stokes, Zambrano et al. 2020). Moreover, patients recovering from COVID-19 may also have psychological symptoms [e.g., anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)] and cognitive symptoms (e.g., memory loss and inattention). Several studies have shown that nearly half of COVID-19 survivors report decreased quality of survival, 22% have anxiety/depression, and 23% have persistent psychological symptoms at 3 months(Carfì, Bernabei et al. 2020, Wong, Shah et al. 2020). Other persistent symptoms include loss of smell, joint pain, headache, dry syndrome, rhinitis, taste disturbances, loss of appetite, dizziness, myalgia and insomnia. During the Covid-19 outbreak, insomnia prevalence was estimated at 38·9% across 5 studies, which causes serious damage to public mental health(Pappa, Ntella et al. 2020).
Insomnia is one of the most common complaints, with more than 5 million visits per year in the United States(Ford, Wheaton et al. 2014). Insomnia has a complex association with other physical and mental illnesses, and most patients have one or more risk factors or comorbidities, such as depression, anxiety, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and neurodegenerative diseases(Taylor, Mallory et al. 2007). The genetic basis of insomnia is not fully described, and genome-wide association studies have identified many loci that may be associated with insomnia, and also overlap with depression, anxiety, neuroticism, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, and other disorders(Stein, McCarthy et al. 2018, Jansen, Watanabe et al. 2019). As circadian rhythms and sleep are fundamental biological processes integral to human health and their disruption is associated with detrimental physiological consequences(Lane, Qian et al. 2023), many studies have found that patients with long COVID-19 have an increased probability of developing insomnia, but the mechanism of correlation between COVID-19 and insomnia is still unclear.
In this study, we firstly tried to explain mechanism of circadian rhythm disturbance caused by COVID-19, via studying the genetic signatures and the potential regulatory targets and pathways.