Stop working out for just a few days and you start to lose it. What’s more, it gets tougher and tougher just to maintain muscle as we get older. But now a number of muscle-boosting drugs are being tested in clinical trials.
Is staying strong into old age about to get much easier? The origin of this kind of muscle-boosting drug dates back to the 1990s, when a team in the US discovered a protein resembling known growth factors, which boost or hinder cell growth. Mutating the gene to block the protein’s function resulted in mighty mice, in which each muscle was two to three times the usual size.
Rapid bursts of ageing are causing a total rethink of how we grow old The researchers went on to show that mutations in what they called myostatin are behind the “double muscling” seen in some breeds of animals, such as Belgian Blue cattle or bully whippet dogs. Then, in 2004, they reported that a 4-year-old boy with unusually large muscles had mutations in the myostatin gene. All this suggested that blocking myostatin in people would dramatically boost muscle size.
Essentially, muscle is costly to maintain in energy terms, so we’ve evolved to use it or lose it. In addition to muscle-boosting growth factors released when we use our muscles, there are muscle-shrinking factors like myostatin. The size of our muscles is determined by the balance between them: shift the dial by blocking myostatin and the same level of exercise should result in larger muscles.
That could make a big difference in older age. The fact that maintaining big muscles requires a lot of calories is an advantage in a world where many of us eat too much. Boosting muscles should help prevent or treat obesity as well as related conditions such as diabetes.
A fresh understanding of tiredness reveals how to get your energy back “Muscle is really important not only for preventing frailty as we age, but also for metabolic health as well, because it stores the majority of sugar after a meal,” says Brendan Gabriel at the University of Aberdeen in the UK. There are also many muscle-wasting conditions, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, where muscle-boosting drugs should help. But while the first generation of myostatin blockers produced dramatic effects in animals like mice, in people they’ve been a disappointment.
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