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closeThe real pandemic of the 21st century
Posted by adpetrum1 on 14 May 2008 at 08:29 GMT
Thanks to the advances of biomedical sciences, the lifespan of Westerners is constantly increasing, included patients with chronic, debilitating diseases. The growth in lifespan does unfortunately parallel the growth of the incidence of muscle atrophy (included its most severe degree, i.e., sarcopenia), due not only to the normal ageing process itself but also to the accumulated effect of decades of physical inactivity.
Muscle atrophy is becoming a pandemic of the XXI century and, as such, a major health problem. Besides its consequences on functional capacity during daily living (e.g., fall risk), muscle atrophy is the main source of most distressing symptoms (e.g., chronic fatigue) suffered by chronic patients and old people.
Any effort to understand the molecular mechanisms involved in muscle protein synthesis (MPS) under different conditions, included the study of sexual differences is thus welcome as it might set the bases for future biomedical interventions. In the present study the authors nicely use state of the art technology to study sexual differences in MPS among older people.