Editorial: Cross Adaptation and Cross Tolerance in Human Health and Disease

Abstract

Human physiological responses to heat, cold, hypoxia, microgravity, hyperbaria, hypobaria and fasting are well studied in isolation. However, in the natural world these stressors are often combined or experienced sequentially (Tipton, 2012). Studies examining human responses to these more realistic, yet relatively complex, circumstances remain sparse, but could provide important insights into an emerging area within human physiology: cross-adaptation (Figure 1)(Lunt et al., 2010; Gibson et al., 2017). Much of the current state of knowledge involves data demonstrating benefits of exercising in hot conditions, prior to performance in hypoxia (Gibson et al., 2015; Heled et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2014a, 2014b, 2016; Salgado et al., 2017; White et al., 2016), with cold to hypoxia (Lunt et al., 2010), hypoxia to heat (Sotiridis et al., 2018), combined stressors (Neal et al., 2017; Takeno et al., 2001), and more mechanistic (signalling) data from animal models exposed to substantive volumes of stress (Maloyan & Horowitz, 2002, 2005). The role of nutrient availability and the nutrient-exercise interactions which drive phenotypic adaptations to skeletal muscle exposed to a multitude of stressors is also a growing field of interest (Hawley, Lundby, Cotter, & Burke, 2018). This research topic includes publications which address both clinical and exercise-centric aspects allied to Cross-adaptation and Cross-tolerance in Human Health and Disease.