Amy Norton
Health Day Reporter
Friday, April 14, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Prolonged immobility puts person at dangerous risk of blood clots — yet hibernating bears are around Lay for several months without any problems. Now, scientists think they have found the reason.
Researchers hope this insight could eventually lead to new drugs for preventing life-threatening blood clots that begin but can travel to the brain and cause stroke, or spread to the lungs and cause a pulmonary embolism.
In their new study, the researchers found that in hibernating bears, a specific protein — called heat shock protein 47 (HSP47) — is released from Their normal activity levels were greatly reduced. This appeared to prevent the animals from forming blood clots during their months-long sleep.
What’s more, the researchers found that this phenomenon also occurs in other species, including humans. Specifically, people paralyzed by spinal cord injuries had lower HSP47 activity.
This may sound counterintuitive, as a temporary inactivity—recovering from an injury or surgery, or requiring a long haul flight—promotes blood clots in some people form. But it is known that paralyzed patients are not at higher risk of blood clots than people with limited mobility.
New findings suggest HSP47 may be key, say the study authors. , according to Dr. Tobias Petzold, one of the study’s researchers. Petzold of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. People, including old-fashioned aspirin. However, Petzold said, they have side effects, such as an increased risk of bleeding. Therefore, there is still a need to continue to search for highly effective but safer drugs.
“We think that the body’s ability to mobilize ‘natural’ blood thinners spontaneously helps address an unmet clinical need,” Petzold said.
“We believe bears are the solution to our sedentary lifestyles walking library,” Petzold said.
After all, he points out, hibernating bears spend a significant portion of their waking lives Eating and piling on huge pounds and then laying around doing nothing for half a year. In humans, this is actually the recipe for obesity, muscle loss, thinning bones, type 2 diabetes, and many other health problems, including blood clots.
Yet the bear emerged from hibernation unscathed. Understanding what exactly protects them could, in theory, lead to entirely new treatments for a variety of human diseases associated with “modern lifestyles,” Petzold said.
It makes perfect sense that other researchers are studying bears for this.
A study published last year by a Washington State University team identified specific proteins that appear to help protect hibernating grizzly bears from diabetes.
It turns out that humans have counterparts for these protective proteins.
In the new study, Petzold and colleagues studied not only brown bears, but also pigs that were confined or free-roaming, and those with reduced mobility due to spinal cord injuries. or paralyzed people.
Researchers found that blood cells of hibernating bears had more HSP47 was reduced by an average of 55-fold. Similar patterns were seen in both pigs and humans.
This all suggests that HSP47 may be a good target for new drugs for people at high risk of blood clots in the short term, according to an editorial published alongside the study, on the question of immobility .
Researchers now know much more about what triggers blood clots than what prevents them, writes Mirta Schattner in Buenos Aires, Argentina The School of Medicine studies the mechanisms of blood clotting. Great way to learn about human biology. “
However, blood clots don’t just form when people are immobilized, Schattner points out. Chronic health conditions such as diabetes and various cancers also increase the risk. Therefore, she added One future question, said, is whether this heat shock protein is also important for blood clotting in these cases.
The findings were published online April 13 in the journal science.
