Saurabh Chatterjee, University of California, Irvine – Extreme heat is damaging our vital organs

The Academic Minute

Extreme heat stress can have many negative effects on our bodies.

Saurabh Chatterjee, professor of environmental & occupational health at the at the Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health at the University of California, Irvine, determines how to protect ourselves.

Dr. Saurabh Chatterjee is a human physiologist with specialized training in immunology. He has made significant contributions to the field of host-microbiome interactions with redox biology, neuroimmune pathology, and gut-brain interactions in pro-inflammatory disease processes, including Gulf War illness, chronic multi-symptom illnesses and brain manifestations of liver diseases, drug discovery, and gut-brain directed therapeutics. He holds a second appointment at the UC Irvine School of Medicine and is a research health scientist with the Department of Veterans Affairs at the Long Beach VA Medical Center.

Extreme heat is damaging our vital organs

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In a dynamically changing global landscape, the imminent threat of climate change is evident in rising temperatures. As we see in my recent research, our warming planet is undoubtedly leading to acute and chronic heat stress that harms the health of us all, but especially our aging population.

As one of the first studies to fill the knowledge gap on the effects of heat stress on a molecular level, we used mouse models to mirror human biology and found that heat stress affects one of our most important biological mechanisms that connects our gut, liver, and brain.

This complex and multidirectional communication system touches everything in our body and when we analyzed heat-stressed elderly mice, we found an increased production of ORM2, a liver protein that is linked to gut inflammation and brain impact.

As more ORM2 is secreted from the liver, we found that the protein made its way into the brain and spine, which contributes to cognitive decline and compromises the ability to form new neurons and exacerbates age-related diseases. For our aging population, this is especially concerning since heat stress can worsen common health conditions like cardiovascular, respiratory, and kidney diseases.

One of our research’s key takeaways is the potential to use ORM2 for targeted interventions to prevent worsening of liver and neurodegenerative brain disease from heat exposure. This observation advances molecular insights into our understanding of why our body reacts the way it does to adverse heat events and will serve as a foundation for future tools that can predict, diagnosis and mitigate the harmful effects of heat stress.

Read More:
[Nature] – Periodic heat waves-induced neuronal etiology in the elderly is mediated by gut-liver-brain axis: a transcriptome profiling approach

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