Do older adults experience greater thermal strain during heat waves?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Heat waves are the cause of many preventable deaths around the world, especially among older adults and in countries with more temperate climates. In the present study, we examined the effects of age on whole-body heat loss and heat storage during passive exposure to environmental conditions representative of the upper temperature extremes experienced in Canada. Direct and indirect calorimetry measured whole-body evaporative heat loss and dry heat exchange, as well as the change in body heat content. Twelve younger (21 ± 3 years) and 12 older (65 ± 5 years) adults with similar body weight (younger: 72.0 ± 4.4 kg; older: 80.1 ± 4.2 kg) and body surface area (younger: 1.8 ± 0.1 m(2); older: 2.0 ± 0.1 m(2)) rested for 2 h in a hot-dry [36.5 °C, 20% relative humidity (RH)] or hot-humid (36.5 °C, 60% RH) environment. In both conditions, evaporative heat loss was not significantly different between groups (dry: p = 0.758; humid: p = 0.814). However, the rate of dry heat gain was significantly greater (by approx. 10 W) for older adults relative to younger adults during the hot-dry (p = 0.032) and hot-humid exposure (p = 0.019). Consequently, the cumulative change in body heat content after 2 h of rest was significantly greater in older adults in the hot-dry (older: 212 ± 25 kJ; younger: 131 ± 27 kJ, p = 0.018) as well as the hot-humid condition (older: 426 ± 37 kJ; younger: 317 ± 45 kJ, p = 0.037). These findings demonstrate that older individuals store more heat during short exposures to dry and humid heat, suggesting that they may experience increased levels of thermal strain in such conditions than people of younger age.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".