Talk synopses for the Healthy Muscle Ageing Conference

On this page you will find details for each of the presentations to be given at the Healthy Muscle Ageing Conference.

Prof Stu Philips

Sipping from the Fountain of Youth: Strategies for Staving off (Muscle) Ageing

Due primarily to improved sanitation and medical advances, 30+ years have been added to human life expectancy in the past century. However, healthy life expectancy – often called healthspan – has not kept pace with lifespan. Non-communicable chronic diseases now constitute the greatest threats to mortality and morbidity but also the greatest contributors to the lowering of people’s health-related quality of life. Thus, while extending lifespan is a noble objective, one might argue that a better matching of healthspan to lifespan, or compression of morbidity, would be an appropriate target for aging well. Alternatively, as many have stated, if we can ‘reverse engineer’ aging, we can count on reduced morbidity. But what can we do to achieve this healthspan-lifespan matching or to counter aging? The aim of this talk is to examine the evidence for what we know can enhance healthspan (and maybe lifespan, too) and even show indications of being anti-aging. A further aim is to look at drugs, nutraceuticals, and lifestyle practices that may add to, or synergize with, what we already know can improve healthspan and enhance lifespan.

Prof Mette Hansen

Influence of menopause and use of hormone therapy on muscle mass and muscle function

It is a fact that females have a smaller muscle mass compared to males. In addition, the decline in muscle strength, muscle quality and muscle function are accelerated when women enter menopause where the level of estrogen declines markedly. Since sarcopenia is closely related to physical disabilities and loss of independence which may affect life quality it is important to implement effective prevention strategies to postpone loss of muscle function. This will reduce the challenge to the health care system when there in the coming years will be an increasing number of postmenopausal females.

It is well established that resistance exercise enhances muscle protein synthesis and regular resistance training induces muscle hypertrophy. However, low endogenous level of circulating estrogen in postmenopausal women seems to reduce the sensitivity to anabolic stimuli such as exercise, whereas use of estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) enhances myofibrillar protein synthesis rate in response to resistance exercise. Furthermore, estrogen also seems to be important for the remodeling of connective tissue, since use of ERT is associated with a higher tendon collagen synthesis rate, and structural and biomechanical differences in the patellar tendon compared to age-matched postmenopausal women who do not use ERT.

Results primarily from human in vivo trials will be presented.

Prof Jatin Burniston

Proteome Dynamics to Inform Healthy Muscle Ageing

A loss in protein quality is one of four primary hallmarks of ageing that have emerged from extensive experimental studies in model organisms. However, losses in protein quality or changes to the proteostasis network in the muscle of older humans remain largely unexplored. In model organisms, ageing is associated with changes to the turnover rate of select proteins and adaptations to specific members of the proteostasis network, including chaperone proteins. Until recently, technical limitations constrained human studies to measurements on the average turnover rate of mixed-protein homogenates. Such data ignore the wide diversity of proteins in muscle that each have different functions and may respond differently to ageing and exercise interventions. We have pioneered the application of unique dynamic proteome profiling methods in human muscle, which are able to provide simultaneous data on both the abundance profile and turnover rate of individual proteins. This talk will present our latest dynamic proteome data from a pilot study investigating muscle responses to resistance exercise in young and older adults. Our findings illustrate how a greater focus on muscle proteome quality could help to improve the translation of knowledge between model organisms and human studies.

Prof Leigh Breen

Combatting Muscle Disuse Atrophy in the Quest for Healthy Ageing

One of the greatest threats to global healthcare resources, is the challenge of population ageing. Specifically, lifespan and healthy life expectancy are gradually diverging, meaning that often the final years of life are spent in poor health and disease. An increasingly recognised factor in the age-related decline in health and quality of life, is the loss of skeletal muscle mass, strength, and function (sarcopenia). Occurring from mid-adulthood, sarcopenia is associated with increased risk of non-communicative disease, poorer prognosis, and mortality. Treatment costs of older adults with muscle weakness if ~2-3 times greater than those without, which is alarming given the prediction that >30 million older adults across Europe could be diagnosed with sarcopenia by 2045. Sarcopenia progression is accelerated during disuse events (e.g., during illness and hospitalization), that occur more frequently and are more difficult to recover from in older age. Preventing disuse-induced muscle deterioration in older individuals could i) offset sarcopenia progression, ii) reduce the length of hospital stay, iii) incidence of complications after discharge and iv) and risk of readmission, which will ultimately lower healthcare costs and support healthy life expectancy in an ageing population. In this talk, I will present an overview of the evidence surrounding therapeutic strategies that support muscle health in older adults undergoing disuse, with a focus on exercise interventions implemented before, during and after ‘the event’, and the potential complementary supporting role of nutrition. The overall goal is to provide a contemporary overview of effective strategies to mitigate disuse-induced muscle deterioration in older adults, and to outline future research priorities.

Dr Colleen Deane

Proteomic and transcriptomic features of skeletal muscle adaptation to resistance exercise training as a function of age

A defining feature of ageing is the progressive loss of skeletal muscle mass, which increases the risk of falls, frailty, morbidity and mortality, resulting in an annual economic burden of £2.5 billion in the UK alone. Resistance exercise training (RET) remains the most effective, nonpharmacological intervention to offset age-related muscle decline, however, older age associates with reduced adaptive capacity to RET, which may be due (in part) to altered muscle gene and protein networks. This talk will describe two studies we have conducted in this area investigating transcriptional and proteomic features of skeletal muscle adaptation to resistance exercise training as a function of age.

Oliver Witard

Omega-3 fatty acid ingestion and skeletal muscle protein turnover in older adults

This presentation aims to critically evaluate scientific evidence exploring the therapeutic role(s) of long-chain n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFA) in the context of ageing, with specific reference to sarcopenia. The age-related decline in skeletal muscle mass (and function) is underpinned at the metabolic level by a concept termed muscle anabolic resistance. Anabolic resistance describes the impaired response of muscle protein synthesis (MPS) to physical activity and protein feeding observed in older adults compared with their younger counterparts. Recent interest in the potential anabolic action of n-3 PUFA is based on findings from experimental studies that measured acute changes in the stimulation of MPS and/or chronic changes in muscle mass and strength in response to fish oil-derived n-3 PUFA supplementation. Key findings include a potentiated response of MPS to amino acid provision or resistance-based exercise with n-3 PUFA in healthy older adults that have translated to longer-term changes in muscle mass and strength. The key mechanism(s) underpinning this enhanced response of MPS remains to be fully elucidated, but is likely driven by the incorporation of exogenous n-3 PUFA into the muscle phospholipid membrane and subsequent up-regulation of cell signalling proteins known to control MPS. The optimal daily dose of n-3 PUFA ingestion for skeletal muscle health in older adults remains unknown. However, given that western diets are typically meagre in n-3 PUFA content, nutritional recommendations for maintaining muscle health with advancing age should place greater emphasis on dietary n-3 PUFA intake.