A drug that boosts strength in injured or aging mice restores connections between nerves and muscle and suggests ways to combat weakness in humans due to aging, injury or disease.
A small molecule previously shown to enhance strength in injured or old laboratory mice does so by restoring lost connections between nerves and muscle fibers, Stanford Medicine researchers have found.
It's estimated that sarcopenia, or debilitating muscle frailty, affects about 30% of people over 80 and costs the United States around $380 billion each year. Conditions other than aging can also destabilize these connections, including the disuse of muscles due to bedrest after illness or injury, or muscle-wasting diseases like spinal muscular atrophy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis .
Additional experiments showed that treatment with the drug restored neuromuscular junctions lost during aging and increased muscle strength and function in old laboratory mice. The researchers also identified discrete clumps of 15-PGDH in the muscle fibers of people with several types of neuromuscular disorders suggesting that the gerozyme may have a role in causing these human disorders.
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health , the Canadian Institutes of Health, a Stanford Translational Research and Applied Medicine pilot grant, the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation, the Li Ka Shing Foundation, the Milky Way Research Foundation and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
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