Can You Age Backwards? Science Says Yes!
Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging in Human Skeletal Muscle
1 Buck Institute for Age Research, Novato, California, United States of America, 2 McMaster University, Department of Pediatrics and Medicine, Hamilton, Canada, 3 Center for Genetics, Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, Oakland, California, United States of America
Human aging is associated with skeletal muscle atrophy and functional impairment (sarcopenia). Multiple lines of evidence suggest that mitochondrial dysfunction is a major contributor to sarcopenia. We evaluated whether healthy aging was associated with a transcriptional profile reflecting mitochondrial impairment and whether resistance exercise could reverse this signature to that approximating a younger physiological age. Skeletal muscle biopsies from healthy older (N = 25) and younger (N = 26) adult men and women were compared using gene expression profiling, and a subset of these were related to measurements of muscle strength. 14 of the older adults had muscle samples taken before and after a six-month resistance exercise-training program. Before exercise training, older adults were 59% weaker than younger, but after six months of training in older adults, strength improved significantly (P<0.001)>
Funding: This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants AG18679 (SM), AG024385 (SM), a Nathan Shock Award to the Buck Institute (P30AG025708), an Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar award (SM), and a grant to MT from the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR # 108073).
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Academic Editor: Peter Wenner, Emory University, United States of America
Citation: Melov S, Tarnopolsky MA, Beckman K, Felkey K, Hubbard A (2007) Resistance Exercise Reverses Aging in Human Skeletal Muscle. PLoS ONE 2(5): e465. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000465
Received: February 13, 2007; Accepted: April 25, 2007; Published: May 23, 2007
Copyright: © 2007 Melov et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: smelov@buckinstitute.org (SM); tarnopol@mcmaster.ca (MT)
# These authors contributed equally to this work.
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Eve :-)
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