{"id":51536,"date":"2025-08-07T07:52:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T07:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/51536\/"},"modified":"2025-08-07T07:52:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T07:52:09","slug":"how-the-study-of-hibernating-bears-could-help-humans-heal-deseret-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/51536\/","title":{"rendered":"How the study of hibernating bears could help humans heal \u2013 Deseret News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Each spring, a grizzly bear emerges from its den after months of deep hibernation \u2014 having eaten nothing, barely moved and slowed its heart and metabolism to a crawl. Yet it wakes up strong, alert and healthy. <\/p>\n

Its muscles remain intact. Its organs are unharmed. And any signs of metabolic stress seem to vanish as if they were never there.<\/p>\n

What if humans had access to the same biological resilience?<\/p>\n

That is the question scientists at the University of Utah asked, and they now believe they might have an answer. Their latest research<\/a>, stemming from two studies, suggests that the genetic tool kit that enables animals like bears to survive hibernation could also exist in humans, lying dormant within their DNA. If scientists can learn to activate it, it could transform the treatment of chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes, stroke and Alzheimer\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cHumans already have the genetic framework,\u201d said Dr. Susan Steinwand, lead author in one of the studies. \u201cWe just need to identify the control switches for these hibernator traits.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the research published in Science<\/a>, some of the same genetic switches that enable hibernation may already exist in humans, they\u2019ve just never been used.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s potentially an opportunity \u2014 by understanding these hibernation-linked mechanisms in the genome \u2014 to find strategies to intervene and help with age-related diseases,\u201d said Dr. Chris Gregg, senior author of the studies and professor of neurobiology and human genetics at University of Utah Health.<\/p>\n

The DNA link <\/p>\n

The study focused on a familiar part of the genome: the FTO locus, known as a major risk factor for obesity in humans. Surprisingly, this same region also plays a central role in hibernating animals\u2019 ability to slow metabolism and survive extreme conditions. By instead studying the genes directly, the Utah team zoomed in on noncoding regions of DNA, specifically stretches of DNA called cis-regulatory elements, or CREs. These elements act like \u201cdimmer switches,\u201d controlling how much or how little nearby genes are expressed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s striking about this region is that it is the strongest genetic risk factor for human obesity,\u201d Gregg noted.<\/p>\n

The researchers likened finding these genetic regions to searching for needles in a \u201ca massive DNA haystack.\u201d<\/p>\n

To test their effects, scientists mutated hibernator-specific DNA regions in mice and tracked the results. They saw changes in weight, metabolic rate and even the ability to regulate body temperature, responses similar to those seen in hibernating animals.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you knock out one of these elements \u2014 this one tiny, seemingly insignificant DNA region \u2014 the activity of hundreds of genes changes,\u201d Steinwand said. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, the regions highlighted weren\u2019t genes at all, but control elements, similar to traffic signals directing the flow of genetic activity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis means that mutating a single hibernator-specific region has wide-ranging effects extending far beyond the FTO locus,\u201d Steinwand added.<\/p>\n

What this could mean for medicine <\/p>\n

These findings hope to revolutionize treatments for metabolic and neurological conditions. Understanding hibernators\u2019 metabolic flexibility could lead to better treatments for human metabolic disorders like Type 2 diabetes, the researchers say. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf we could regulate our genes a bit more like hibernators,\u201d said Elliott Ferris, bioinformatician at U of U Health and first author on the second study, \u201cmaybe we could overcome Type 2 diabetes the same way that a hibernator returns from hibernation back to a normal metabolic state.\u201d<\/p>\n

A complementary study from Oregon<\/p>\n

Scientists at Oregon Health and Science University<\/a> are also exploring ways to replicate hibernation-like states in humans. In a recent study, researchers identified a brain-based mechanism called thermoregulatory inversion, a process that allows animals to lower their core body temperature without triggering the usual warming responses like shivering or burning a specific type of fat in the body, brown fat. Essentially, it flips the body\u2019s natural survival settings. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea is to reduce the body temperature to a lower level so that tissues like the brain or heart don\u2019t need as much oxygen,\u201d Dr. Domenico Tupone, senior author of the OHSU study, explained. \u201cThat could improve outcomes from strokes or heart attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

In typical mammals, exposure to cold triggers heat generation. But in hibernators, that response is flipped \u2014 allowing them to survive long periods with little energy use.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we had a mechanism that allows us to transform humans into hibernating animals,\u201d Tupone added, \u201cwe could achieve and control therapeutic hypothermia much better.\u201d<\/p>\n

This could one day allow doctors to safely lower a person\u2019s body temperature during medical emergencies like heart attacks or strokes, giving vital organs more time to survive reduced oxygen flow.<\/p>\n

By learning how to activate or mimic these gene switches, researchers from both universities hope to unlock hibernation\u2019s secrets \u2014 not to help sleep through winter, but to transform how diseases, injury and aging itself are treated.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf that\u2019s hidden in the genome that we\u2019ve already got,\u201d Gregg says, \u201cwe could learn from hibernators to improve our own health.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Each spring, a grizzly bear emerges from its den after months of deep hibernation \u2014 having eaten nothing,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,84,66,35116,1895,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-51536","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-u-s-world","13":"tag-utah","14":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}