Your body gets faster due to intense heat
It’s good It is known that heat causes fatigue in the body due to dehydration. But aging?
A new study concluded that intense heat increases the aging of the human body, a worrying fact due to the increasing frequency of heat waves due to climate change.
Researchers do not talk about the effects of solar radiation on the skin, but are biological aging. Unlike the age – the answer that when asked, your biological age shows that your cells, tissues and organs show your performance well. Biological age can be calculated by looking at physiological and molecular markers in the body as well as using various experiments, such as measuring lung function, cognitive ability or bone density.
Over time, research has shown that exposure to severe heat can weaken body systems, which shows people’s blood pressure, cholesterol and blood function. In the long run, this can increase the dangers of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and dementia. The study, published in the journal Nature Water Change, showed that the effect of severe heat aging is harmful to other known behaviors to the body, such as smoking or drinking alcohol.
The researchers analyzed long -term medical data from 24.922 people in Taiwan, collected between 2008 and 2022. During this time, the island experienced about 30 waves of heat-which lasted by the research team as a period of high temperatures. The researchers for the first time calculated the biological age of people based on the results of various medical tests such as liver, lung and kidney performance tests. They then compared the biological age of people with their time age to see how fast their biological clock was than their actual age. They then referred to this information against possible exposure to heat waves.
The results showed that the more intense heat events that people experienced, their biological age accelerated than their age. On average, among the groups of individuals studied, exposed to two years of heat waves that have been added to the individual’s biological age between eight and 12 days.
“While this number may seem small over time and in different populations, this work may have significant consequences for public health,” said CUI Guo, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong and the main author of the study.
The study also showed that people who do physical work and people living in rural areas are likely to be affected by accelerating biological aging, probably due to greater exposure due to heat waves. However, an unexpected positive effect was also observed: the impact of heat exposure on biological aging has actually been reduced for 15 years. The reason for this is unknown, although GUO points to the possible effect of cooling technologies such as air conditioning, which have become more common in recent years.
This story appeared first Wired en español And translated from Spanish.
