What if you were told there was a completely natural way to stop your body from aging?
What if you were told there was a completely natural way to stop your body from aging? The trick: You’d have to hibernate from September to May each year.
That’s what a team of UCLA biologists and colleagues studying yellow-bellied marmots discovered. These large ground squirrels are able to virtually halt the aging process during the seven to eight months they spend hibernating in their underground burrows, the researchers report today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The study, the first to analyze the rate of aging among marmots in the wild, shows that this anti-aging phenomenon kicks in once the animals reach 2 years old, their age of sexual maturity.
The researchers studied marmot blood samples collected over multiple summer seasons in Colorado, when the animals are active above ground, to build statistical models that allowed them to estimate what occurred during hibernation. They assessed the biological aging of the marmots based on what are known as epigenetic changes — hundreds of chemical modifications that occur to their DNA.
Read more at University of California - Los Angeles
Image: During their time hibernating, marmots’ breathing slows, they burn a single gram of fat per day, and their body temperature plummets to the point that “they feel like fuzzy, cold rocks.” (Credit: Daniel Blumstein/UCLA)
