Hibernation-like state can benefit humans
Reduced aging, extended space travel, better medical outcomes may be possible with long, cold sleep
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could spend the winter hibernating instead of bundling up for the biting winter wind and shovelling your way through the heavy mounds of snow?
Humans bodies don’t have the ability to go into true hibernation, says CBC science columnist Torah Kachur, but they can go into a similar cold, sleep-like state called torpor – and doing that can have a number of benefits.
The technique has been tested in medicine, where it may have the potential to reduce brain damage following a brain injury, heart attack or stroke, or be useful for procedures such as organ transplants. It’s also been shown to slow down cell aging by preventing the ends of your chromosome from shrinking at their usual rate, Kachur told CBC's The Homestretch.
"You’re not necessarily going to wake up looking younger, but you will have delayed that aging process while you were asleep or whatever you want to call it.”
Torpor is also of great interest to NASA for long space flights, as humans in torpor wouldn’t need as much food or space as they would normally.
“NASA is hard at work to try to make humans enter torpor in a realistic way,” Kachur. “We don’t have the natural ability. However, we can do it medically.”
Unlike hibernation which involves really extreme physiological changes, torpor is more like “really deep power naps in the cold,” Kachur said. Your body temperature drops and your metabolism, heart rate and most other physiological functions slow down.
So far, she said, researchers have managed to keep people in torpor for up to a week.
