Does anyone else wish they could eat a bunch of food and then sleep it off for six months? It’s good for bears – and it might be good for us.

Students and professors at Washington State University’s grizzly bear facility are conducting research on the physiology of hibernating bears in order to find ways to better treat diabetes in humans.

One of the professors is Heiko Jansen, an associate professor in the department of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience.

“The bears look a lot like humans with diabetes while they’re hibernating,” Jansen said. “By that what I mean is … their bodies don’t respond to insulin as far as we can tell. They’re also obese.”

Through this research, students try to gain an understanding of hibernation physiology in bears and understand the mechanisms that regulate insulin sensitivity, said Kim Rigano, a graduate student studying zoology for her masters’.

Before bears hibernate, they eat a lot more food than they normally would, in order to stock up on fat.

This fat is what they burn off to survive the six months’ worth of hibernation, and the bears fall into a diabetic-like state, Jansen said.

“The really interesting thing about the bears is that they can reverse that diabetic-like state when they come out of hibernation,” Jansen said. “They do this every year.”

One of the things they have discovered is that the fat cells’ sensitivity to insulin changes with the seasons and are influenced by the blood of the bear.

If a serum is made from the fat cells of an active bear, it can be injected into the fat cell from a hibernating bear and restore the cell’s sensitivity to insulin, Jansen said. Vice versa, a serum from a hibernating cell can make an active season cell lose its responsiveness to insulin.

“Bears become insulin resistant during hibernation, but they don’t suffer any of the ill effects usually associated with insulin resistance in humans,” said Jamie Gehring, another graduate student studying zoology for her master’s degree.

Insulin is normally produced in response to an influx of glucose in the blood, usually after one eats.

Produced from the pancreas, insulin inhibits fat breakdown and promotes fat storage, Rigano said.

Gehring said a hibernating bear is comparable to a human with diabetes. Bears have the higher insulin levels, but are not affected by problems like hypertension or nerve damage that would be seen in humans with diabetes.

“Bears can go to sleep for six to seven months of the year, wake up, and are able to immediately walk around,” Gehring said. “Whereas if a person were bedridden for that long your muscles would atrophy, (and) your bones would become weak.”

Jansen said they are not the first to show there is a change in insulin sensitivity in the bears, but one of the problems is that for virtually all other studies people have to use bears that are anesthetized.

The grizzlies housed at WSU are trained and will allow the human staff to inject them with substances and take blood samples.

One of these substances is dextrose, a type of sugar in the body. This injection is similar to a test given to humans known as an oral glucose tolerance test. The test measures serum levels of glucose, insulin and glucagon in the body to test for diabetes.

Through these tests, Jansen said they have found that since hibernating bears don’t eat, the blood glucose continues to go up in the blood and to the brain, where it’s needed most.

“The bears not only look like a Type II diabetic during hibernation … they also look like a Type I diabetic,” he said. “They have this sort of perfect storm of what in humans is a debilitating disease.”

So far, the research team has discovered that the insulin resistance during hibernation causes the bears to switch from a carbohydrate metabolism to a fat metabolism, which allows the bears to survive off fat storage as opposed to breaking down their muscles, Rigano said.

Multiple factors intersect in the hibernation process, including genetics, environment and biological rhythms. Interruptions of biological rhythms causes them to dampen, which can lead to diabetes in humans.

“One or our hypotheses is biological rhythms are necessary for cells to survive this diabetic-like state,” Jansen said.

The hope is to make important headway and provide the medical community with information on how to better treat diabetes by understanding how bears are reversing that insulin sensitivity back and forth, Rigano said.

“There’s a lot of interest in how these guys are able to stay healthy while immobile and that sort of research can apply to both bedridden and comatose patients,” Gehring said.