Keeping cool could help stall the signs of ageing, going by tests on mice carried out by scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Whitehead Institute and Harvard Medical School, both in the United States.
The researchers believe that hibernation-like habits could work better than anti-ageing creams and sweat-inducing workouts for older people who want to stay looking younger.
Published in the journal Nature Aging, the MIT-led team’s research suggests that we may be able to slow down “changes that accompany ageing” by stimulating a prolonged state of torpor, a shorter alternative to hibernation common in animals where body temperature and energy-use drops.
“Although the full relationship between torpor and ageing remains unclear, our findings point to decreased body temperature as the central driver of this anti-ageing effect,” said MIT assistant professor of biology Dr Sinisa Hrvatin.
A person’s ability to keep cool could also help scientists, in turn, figure out those sometimes puzzling discrepancies between age on the page and how young someone looks and feels.
“Traditional clocks fall short because biological age doesn’t always align with chronology – cells and tissues in different organisms age at varying rates,” the team said in their paper.
They also pointed out that scientists have long struggled with coming up with a reliable metric for measuring biological age.
Fasting and a high-quality diet could also help slow biological ageing, previous studies have found.
In October (2024), doctors at the Mayo Clinic in the US published test results suggesting that how long someone can stand on one leg could be an indicator of relative biological youth.
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“Ageing is a complex phenomenon that we’re just starting to unravel,” said Assist Prof Hrvatin. – dpa
