Hibernate to live longer?

The more time spent hibernating, the longer you may live – well, only in animals according to researchers.

They say hibernation slows down the shortening of telomeres, and could explain why some rodents live longer than other animals.

Telomeres are pieces of DNA at the end of chromosomes that shorten every time a cell divides, and in response to oxidative stress.

The findings, from a study of captive rodents, were published last week in the Biology Letters.

University of Western Sydney ecologist Dr Christopher Turbill says the results suggest animals that hibernate age slower.

When animals hibernate, their body temperature and metabolism drops, reducing the amount of energy they require enabling them to get through a long cold winter when there’s no food about, and to maintain a decent body weight so they are ready to pounce into action come spring.

But while this suggests hibernation slows the rate of ageing, the longer life span could be due to some other factor, Mr Turbill says.

He and his colleagues tested if hibernation affected the rate of telomere shortening in a cold temperate European rodent, which is known to rest up for up to nine months of the year in burrows under the snow in winter.

In a study carried out at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, he and colleagues measured the loss of body mass in the edible dormouse (Glis glis) over winter hibernation as an index of hibernation – the lower the loss; the more they hibernated in winter.

They then used a technique called PCR to measure the change in telomere lengths in small samples taken from the dormouse.

“We measured the telomere length at the start and the end of the hibernation season. Those individuals that lost more mass over winter also hibernated less and their telomeres shortened faster,” Mr Turbill says.

He stresses telomere shortening does not necessarily cause ageing, but if it is a measure of age, the findings add further evidence that hibernation slows ageing.

While there has been a long-standing fantasy of humans hibernating so they can last the distance of space travel, Mr Turbill says the latest findings can’t shed much light on this dream.

“It’s quite difficult to extrapolate data from small mammals that naturally hibernate to humans that do not hibernate naturally,” he says.