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Keeping Cool May Be the Key To Longevity

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everybody-be-cool-you-be-cool dept.

merryprankster writes "New Scientist reports that Scripps Research Institute scientists have found that lowering the body temperature of mice by just 0.5C extends their lifespan by around 15%. Until now the only proven way of increasing longevity has been calorie restriction — but as this also causes a lowering of body temperature the researchers speculate that this cooling may be the underlying mechanism retarding aging. In this study mice with a defect in their lateral hypothalamus, which has the side effect of cooling body temperature, not only lived longer but also ate normal amounts."

7 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Thermostat by Apocalypse111 · · Score: 3, Funny

    So when my dad kept yelling at me not to touch the thermostat, to keep it at 60 degrees, he was really trying to help me live longer?

    Thanks Dad!

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  2. Ice cream! by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 3, Funny

    Excuse me, I'm off to 31 Flavors. My very life depends on it!

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  3. of course! by GrumpySimon · · Score: 3, Funny

    The Fonz will NEVER die!

    Oh, wrong 'cool'. My bad.

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  4. Confusing title by Gregory+Cox · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Despite the title, and all the comments talking about living in a low-temperature environment, I hope people realise that turning down the thermostat or moving to Alaska is not going to make a difference.

    I'm sure most people remember, but just in case, internal body temperature is carefully regulated by your brain, and won't change unless you catch a fever, or start freezing, in which case you have other problems to worry about.

    As for the results of this study, lab mice are not humans, and correlation does not imply cause... both mice and humans must have evolved to have their normal body temperature for a reason, so lowering it will undoubtedly have some negative effect on the chances of survival.

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    1. Re:Confusing title by radtea · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Remember, it only has to do with living long enough to have lots of babies. After that, you don't really matter to evolution.

      That is probably not true for humans.

      Humans are creatures of culture: accumulated, collectively held knowledge. The people who transmit culture are elders--in modern society, grandparents. They remember how they raised you, and when you have kids they provide guidance that effectively transmits traditions, habits and beliefs across generations. You, on the other hand, don't remember how you were raised, certainly not at a very early age.

      This may explain why humans live twice as long as they "should". One way of normalizing lifespan across species is to measure it in heartbeats. All mammals except humans live about one billion heartbeats. The range is around 0.7 to 1.1 billion. Humans live over two billion heartbeats, far outside the range of all other mammals. One plausible reason for this is that human groups that had more elders were more effectively able to accumulate knowledge across generations, and therefore were more successful. Not everyone would have to survive into old age to make this effective, but everyone would have to have the capacity to survive into old age to make it likely that a few members of each generation would.

      Ergo, until mouse model results are proven in humans--which so far as I know CR etc has not been--they are interesting, but not nearly so promising as one might naively think. We may already be so heavily optimized for long life that the simple tricks that work well for other species are considerably less effective for us.

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  5. As a member of the calorie restriction society... by Washizu · · Score: 5, Funny

    As a member of the calorie restriction society I have one thing to say:

    Ohhhh my god give me a sandwich!

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  6. Don't Get It Backwards by kthejoker · · Score: 4, Informative

    Lest we be fooled, lowering your body temperature as a warm-blooded person is impossible. What the researchers actually did was artificially inject a protein that when unfolding generated higher amounts of heat than normal proteins into the hypothalamus. This tricked the mouse's brain into lowering its internal thermostat.

    This is more like holding a match to a thermometer which can trigger a fire alarm. It's fooling a local sensor to simulate a global sensation.

    So you can't eat ice cream, or live in Antarctica, or whatever to fool it. You have to trick your brain. Even better, at this tricked out brain level, you need less calories to survive because your brain doesn't turn on its "must store fat" warning level as quickly. So this might be a good cure for obesity in the future.

    But seriously, how cool is it that they can use a heat-generating protein to trick a mouse's brain? I love how neurology proves how gullible we are.