CHICAGO (AP) – True or false: Electric fans are a cheap and effective way to stay cool during extreme heat waves. A tiny new experiment in older adults suggests the answer may not be as simple as it seems.
It’s an important issue, particularly for seniors and sick people, whose bodies struggle to adapt to extreme temperatures that are becoming more common as the climate changes. The results of the experiment suggest that fans may be less effective for those 60 and up than in younger people during triple-digit heat because older people don’t sweat as much.
The authors don’t want anyone to stop using fans in normal hot weather, though, and they caution that their conclusions are not clear-cut because they studied so few people at just one extremely high temperature.
THE EXPERIMENT
Eight adults aged 60 to 80 years agreed to sit for about two hours in a chamber resembling a walk-in freezer, only it was heated to 107 degrees. Researchers used a steam generator to gradually increase humidity to 70 percent. The participants sat with a 16-inch electric fan in the chamber on one day, and came back another and sat without the fan.