Learning to sleep like a bear could save your life

Furbert, a doctor originally working at Sweden’s Rebro University Hospital and Denmark’s Aarhus University, traveled to Swedish bear country by snowmobile and snowshoes, eager to answer the question: How do bears actually behave? Survive a long hibernation without dying?

Blood clots, bedsores, bone loss, muscle degeneration and a host of other ailments appear to be something bears and other hibernating animals avoid during hibernation.

As a result, doctors and veterinarians around the world are exploring hibernators’ deep sleep abilities and using these insights to develop drugs to treat cardiovascular problems and other ailments in humans. Furbert’s study of the bear-blood mystery is just the latest in a series of studies on bears and other hibernating animals. Even space agencies and the military are pouring money into hibernation research, hoping to use the findings to help astronauts endure the rigors of space travel and treat injured soldiers.

Manuela Thienel, a cardiologist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, says you can indeed learn a lot from nature. In collaboration with Furbert, he led a recent study of hibernating bears. Far beyond our imagination.

Because so many drug trials and other medical research focus on testing treatments in laboratory rats and mice, this work is part of a movement that looks at traditionally unstudied animals to gather information about their Insights into the strange workings of the body, in hopes of developing new drugs for humans.

“I’m a little tired of the traditional way we do medical research, which starts with a disease and experiments on mice and rats to find a cure,” Furbert said. For bears, he said, the opposite is true.

He said a hibernating brown bear is an animal that cannot get sick, but it should. This is a living library of biological solutions.

Brown bears take sleep very seriously. When the furry giants gain weight in the fall, they can hibernate for up to eight months.

However, no matter how tired you are, if a person tries to sleep for that long, the consequences will be disastrous: muscles will atrophy. Bones will become weak. The skin may become scabbed and develop bedsores.

In fact, hibernation is not a true form of sleep that people experience. This is a more extreme case: a state of deep energy conservation in which a brown bear’s heart rate drops to less than 10 beats per minute.

As a cardiologist, Furbert’s passion was blood. In humans, simply taking a transatlantic flight increases the risk of blood clots. But when bears emerge from their dens after a months-long nap, they are refreshed and free of clots.

The team found that these patients had much lower levels of HSP47 than uninjured people. The same was true for captive pigs and participants in bed rest studies.

We’re on to something, Furbert said.

Other animals hibernate to an even greater degree than bears.

Every fall, thirteen rows of ground squirrels burrow into the soil, curl up into a little ball of fur, and go to sleep. But unlike brown bears, these Great Plains rodents experience body temperatures that plummet well above freezing during hibernation. It rocks me to sleep every week or two and then gets the chills again.

This got veterinary scientist Ashley Zehnder thinking: What is Is the squirrel repairing its body again and again after almost freezing to death?

she She and colleagues at Fauna Bio, a company she co-founded, looked at heart tissue samples taken at different times during hibernation. The research team found that genes in the squirrel cells were activated to protect and repair the heart during recovery.

Fauna Bio is testing a compound designed to mimic human responses as a potential drug to help improve heart function after damage, with the goal of starting clinical trials as soon as possible.

Zeidel said there is definitely more and more people starting to take a critical look at how we use data from a variety of different species to improve human health.

Easily purchased from breeding plants and bred in captivity, rats and mice became the industry standard for medical research, with study after study based on the same animals.

but The dramatic fall in the cost of genome sequencing, combined with the expansion of data sharing, has led to a rush to move beyond so-called model organisms, such as laboratory mice and other animals often studied in scientific research. Take for example earlier this year, More than 100 scientists constructed and analyzed the genomes of 240 mammalian species in an effort to understand human disease.

However, there is considerable pressure to stick with old-fashioned laboratory rodents. I can’t tell you how many times those of us who study hibernation have received comments saying, well, you can’t do this in a mouse model? Hibernating ground squirrel.

A big problem, she adds, is that laboratory rodents are often inbred. How close are they to a crazy situation?

In another paper published last year in the journal Science, Carey and her colleagues found that squirrel gut microbes recycle discarded chemicals and convert them into amino acids that the animals use to maintain muscle.

The discovery raises the potential for probiotic supplements not only to help the elderly and malnourished people with muscle wasting, but also to keep astronauts strong in zero gravity.

NASA and other space agencies have funded hibernation research in hopes of putting space travelers into a hibernation-like state for long-duration missions and withstanding cosmic radiation. Although no one knows exactly why, hibernators are resistant to radiation.

Carey said it’s an exciting time for hibernation biology. People from outside the traditional hibernation world want to come in and collaborate.

At first, it was difficult for Furbert Given the inherent conservatism of the medical research community, funding for brown bear work was secured. But ultimately, his team collaborated with NASA and the German Aerospace Center.

Now, his team is looking for a chemical to develop a new blood-thinning drug with fewer side effects than existing drugs. The team said it could be another five to 10 years before a new drug becomes available.

Furbert says we need to leave some room for these crazy projects.

This article is part of Animal Kingdom , a column that explores the strange and fascinating world of animals and the ways we admire, threaten and rely on them.