The efficacy of fan use on autophagy and the cellular stress response during prolonged exposure to extreme heat in older adults: a randomized trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent guidance has advocated the use of electric fans as a simple and sustainable cooling strategy to safeguard older adults during exposure to extreme heat. While we showed that fans have negligible impacts on core temperature during daylong (8 h) heat exposure (36 °C, 45% relative humidity (RH)), their impact on cellular responses and potential contribution to heat-induced cellular vulnerability in older adults remains unknown. We assessed 18 participants (8 females, median age 72 (IQR, 67–76) years) exposed to three heat exposures (8 h, 36 °C, 45% RH) with either no fan (control), or with fans generating air speeds of 2 m/s, or 4 m/s directed at the front of the body. Rectal temperature was measured continuously, while proteins associated with autophagy, the heat shock response, acute inflammation, and apoptotic signaling were measured before and after each exposure in peripheral blood mononuclear cells. We observed signs of autophagic dysfunction as indexed via elevations in p62 and pULK1/ULK1 from baseline in each condition; however, responses were not different between conditions ( p ≥ 0.077). Further, while fan use did not alleviate elevations in rectal temperature or prevent observations of autophagic dysfunction compared to control, fan use at 4 m/s elicited significant elevations in apoptotic protein cleaved-caspase-3 (mean difference: +0.69 relative quantity, p = 0.033), potentially attributed to elevated serum osmolality (+2.6 mOsm/L, p = 0.020). Therefore, fan use at high settings during heatwaves may be ineffective at alleviating autophagic dysfunction and can potentially incur greater cellular stress in older adults. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT05695079
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".