"Patients who suffer an infarction or stroke experience irreparable damage after just a few minutes of oxygen deprivation. Theoretically, very few changes might be needed to adopt this unusual metabolism."
Researchers found that the bodies of naked mole rats are flooded with molecules and enzymes which allows fructose to be metabolised.
Humans need an atmosphere that has at least 10 per cent oxygen to survive, but naked mole rats have evolved to live in stuffy underground burrows in the African desert which can be 25km long, and have little air.
They are also highly social creatures that snuggle together at night for warmth, but can end up nearly suffocating if they are trapped in the middle of a "mole ball".
In the new study, the researchers exposed naked mole rats to low oxygen conditions in the laboratory and found that they released large amounts of fructose into the bloodstream, a metabolic process previously only seen in plants.
The experiment showed they can survive 18 minutes of complete oxygen deprivation by falling into a kind of suspended animation. When this happens their heart rate drops from 200 beats per minute to around 50.
But crucially, once they get a sniff of oxygen they start moving again as if nothing happened, and suffer no lasting damage.
"This is just the latest remarkable discovery about the naked mole rat - a cold-blooded mammal that lives decades longer than other rodents, rarely gets cancer, and doesn't feel many types of pain," said Thomas Park, professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who let the research. "The naked mole rat has simply rearranged some basic building-blocks of metabolism to make it super-tolerant to low oxygen conditions."
The scientists also showed that naked mole rats are protected from another deadly aspect of low oxygen - a buildup of fluid in the lungs called pulmonary edema that afflicts mountain climbers at high altitude.
The research was published in the journal Science.
