Here’s why older adults naturally lose muscle mass over time and how regular physical activity and resistance training can help
“It really is the neurology, as well as the muscular system and the interactions between the two, that changes,” she says. “There’s a fair amount of evidence that says all of those things are still there and [that] we can retrain them.”
Several factors contribute to involuntary age-related muscle loss. The exact age people start to see muscle mass decline varies, Gray says, but many begin to see noticeable changes in their 30s. Studies suggest that muscle mass decreases by about 3 to 8 percent per decade after age 30 and at higher rates after age 60. Losing that strength may not only be frustrating in keeping up with daily activities but can also have significant health consequences.
“If you look at who’s shrinking, and how much they’re shrinking, it predicts really important stuff, like how long you’re going to live, how vulnerable you are to getting sick and having to be in the hospital, how likely you are to develop problems taking care of yourself,” says Stephanie Studenski, a geriatrician and professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh.
I am working on beating my 33 year old son at Arm wrestling. I am making very gradual progress (in the sense that rather than him beating me easily I can at least lose 2:1 - with my dominant arm and his non-dominant).
I have moved to using 10kg of extra weight for chinups. That is useful for building strength, but I don’t do a lot of exercise.
Why Do Muscles Age? New Study Answers the Regeneration Puzzle
Cornell University researchers have created a detailed understanding of how muscles lose their ability to regenerate as they age, using mice as a model. They identified 29 cell types and found that immune cells and muscle stem cells behave differently in older mice, leading to discoordination in muscle repair.
As muscles age, their cells lose the ability to regenerate and heal after injury. Now, Cornell University researchers have created the most comprehensive portrait to date of how that change, in mice, unfolds over time.
“The fundamental question that drove the initial study was really a question that had perplexed the skeletal muscle biology community,” said Ben Cosgrove, associate professor of biomedical engineering and the paper’s senior author. “Does the decline in regeneration seen in old muscles come from changes to the stem cells that drive the repair process themselves, or does it come from changes in the way that they are instructed by other cell types?”
In the study published in Nature Aging, researchers sampled cells from young, old, and geriatric mice at six time points after inducing injury via a variant of snake venom toxin. They identified 29 defined cell types, including immune cells that exhibited differences in their abundance and reaction time between age groups, and muscle stem cells that self-renew in youth but stall out as muscles age.
https://scitechdaily.com/why-do-muscles-age-new-study-answers-the-regeneration-puzzle/
Paper Reference: “Transcriptomic analysis of skeletal muscle regeneration across mouse lifespan identifies altered stem cell states” by Lauren D. Walter, Jessica L. Orton, Ioannis Ntekas, Ern Hwei Hannah Fong, Viviana I. Maymi, Brian D. Rudd, Iwijn De Vlaminck, Jennifer H. Elisseeff and Benjamin D. Cosgrove, 22 November 2024, Nature Aging .
DOI: 10.1038/s43587-024-00756-3
Interesting follow up in an older paper (begs the question-why aren’t we seeing actual clinical therapy?)
“Our laboratory has recently developed novel gene-editing technologies that could be used to accelerate muscle recovery after injury and improve muscle function,” he says. “We could potentially use this technology to either directly reduce Wnt4 levels in skeletal muscle or to block the communication between Wnt4 and muscle stem cells.”
https://scitechdaily.com/new-research-shows-how-to-boost-muscle-regeneration-and-rebuild-tissue/