Key points from today’s guests:
Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer, The University of Kansas Health System
- The hospital COVID count for this week is at 8 inpatients, down from 11 last week. RSV and flu numbers are also down.
- New research blends two unlikely topics – Alzheimer’s and hot tubs.
- It may sound crazy until you connect the dots between heat and metabolism and your brain.
- With this program, we are trying to open up our hearts and our minds to new ideas and new thoughts.
- What we're really talking about is how to make sure you take care of yourself. With Alzheimer's disease, we are looking at how faith, science, and even hot tubs, can help.
Dr. Jeff Burns, M.D., co-director, KU Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center; memory care specialist, The University of Kansas Health System
- There's a very large scientific base that links metabolism with brain health.
- If we can go after metabolism as a target, we might be able to help people with Alzheimer's slow or prevent the disease.
- This hot tub research is a great example of how we are thinking about metabolism in several different ways.
- It’s a really exciting time for Alzheimer's disease research and this focus on brain health. This research shows the variety and diversity of approaches that we're taking to try and to stop Alzheimer's.
Dr. Paige Geiger, Ph.D., physiologist & researcher, KU Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center
- This is the very first time that anyone is doing a clinical trial looking at heat therapy for Alzheimer's disease prevention, and we're really excited about what we might find in those connections between metabolism and the brain.
- There's a growing body of research to suggest that sitting in a hot tub can benefit a number of different metabolic factors -- improving blood glucose, improving blood pressure, lowering inflammation.
- A lot of that work has been done in terms of understanding the body’s thermal response.
- If you think about exercise, your body temperature is rising, you're starting to sweat, your heart rate is going up, your blood is getting redistributed to other parts of your body, including to your brain. And when you sit in a hot tub, you get a lot of those same responses.
- We think there's some shared physiology between exercise and body temperature and we are interested in the coordination between the way the body uses glucose and the way the brain uses glucose.
- We know that there are so many patient populations or individuals that cannot exercise enough to get the benefits -- maybe due to an injury or due to advanced age. So I think it's important to consider alternatives and so we're really excited that heat therapy might be a good alternative for people that can't get the benefits of exercise.
Dr. Jill Morris, Ph.D., physiologist & researcher, KU Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center
- Shock proteins are a family of proteins that act like the cell defense system in the body. So they are responsive to heat but they also respond to other changes that the cell might think are stressful like changes in pH.
- Type two diabetes is a major risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. For type two diabetes, exercise, diet, lifestyle interventions, and also heat therapy, can improve blood glucose, blood pressure, and potentially brain glucose metabolism, which is what we're looking for.
- We're really excited to see where this takes us and how it allows us to be among the first to quantify some of these changes in the brain. We're also going to look at some blood biomarkers. We have the benefit of being in a time where there's been great advances and our ability to measure brain outcomes.
- We are looking for research participants who are 65 or older. They can apply at www.kuadrc.org/fight_ad.
Thursday, April 4 at 8 a.m. is the next All Things Heart. Learn about how a camper felt chest pain that turned out to be a tear in a major artery.
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