What if you could get a lot of the same benefits of exercise from sitting in a hot tub?
Dr. Paige Geiger from the University of Kansas Medical Center presented her research on the mechanisms and potential applications of heat therapy in preventing type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease at the College of Life Sciences Seminar. Although still in the early stages of research, Geiger believes heat therapy has the potential to become a far more powerful tool.
Geiger entered this field after discovering a paper on the role of Heat Shock Proteins (HSPs) in insulin action and their potential to regulate glucose function. HSPs, commonly thought of as chaperones, are activated by heat exposure and assist in the folding of proteins, helping maintain the proper structure of proteins and protecting against the damage caused by stress. This paper led Geiger to wonder if HSPs in muscle could activate glucose-utilizing pathways, which are important for preventing and managing diabetes.
The development of type 2 diabetes begins with insulin resistance, where the body struggles to regulate glucose. Initially, insulin secretion increases to compensate, but over time, blood glucose rises, and the body can no longer keep up. Geiger theorized that maintaining and activating HSPs through exercise or heat could help maintain insulin function and prevent the progression of type 2 diabetes.
To test her theory, Geiger implemented a diabetic model in a study of rats by feeding them a high-fat diet for six weeks, causing the rats to become pre-diabetic. She then subjected the rats to twenty-minute hot tub sessions once a week before giving them a glucose test. Despite the diet, the rats’ glucose spiked and was nearly back to normal within the same time frame as a healthy individual.
“The muscle acts like a sink, taking up about 70 percent of the glucose in the body,” Geiger explained. “When the muscle starts losing that metabolic function, the disease severity increases relatively quickly.” Implementing the heat treatment restores the ability of the muscle to take up that glucose and, as a result, can slow the progression of type 2 diabetes.
Geiger has also started to consider how heat therapy could be applied to other disease models. She learned that type 2 diabetes is a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, which many people don’t know. “We’re not constantly thinking about how Alzheimer’s disease develops, but it’s becoming more common to think of it as a metabolic disease,” she explained.
Geiger figured that if heat therapy could help prevent type 2 diabetes, it might also prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Fortunately, the University of Kansas Medical Center has an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center funded by the National Institute of Health. With the help of her colleagues, Geiger received a small grant for a pilot study that included eighteen participants aged sixty-five and older, which showed significant reductions in average blood pressure and improvements in brain blood flow after four weeks of heat therapy. After publishing this pilot study in January, they are now working on a clinical trial with sixty participants over a ten-week period.
To conclude her seminar, Geiger stated, “I’m never going to propose that we replace exercise with heat.” She instead emphasized how heat therapy can work alongside exercise in efforts to improve both metabolic and cognitive health.
To learn more about this pilot study, click here.