For those not in the know, sarcopenia is the age-related loss of muscle mass. It seems to be an understandable phenomenon, but as my experience shows, even many medics hear it for the first time. The fact is that with age muscle cells myocytes die and in their place come fat cells and connective tissue (the same collagen that everyone wants after 30 years old 😆) Below the post I will show a comparison of MRI of a young man and an old man to make it clearer visually.
Sarcopenia is also associated with osteoporosis, which is a pathology in which a person loses bone mass. So where there is sarcopenia, there is likely to be osteoporosis, and vice versa.
Muscle and skeletal degeneration occurs due to a number of causes, the main ones being genes and decreased synthesis of anabolic hormones. These are primarily steroid hormones, then growth hormone. Of the steroid hormones, estradiol, testosterone and thyroid hormones are responsible for muscle and skeletal growth. It is important to realize that men need estradiol (female hormone) for normal functioning of the skeleton and muscles! Bodybuilders forget about this, that they take aromatase inhibitors to suppress estradiol (and then get fractures and ligament ruptures). Also with the help of estradiol regulation at puberty it is possible to increase the height of stunted children (not many people know about it). But that's not what we're talking about today.
You have heard of testosterone and growth hormone. In the West (and in our country, too), these hormones are still used for anti-aging therapy. This includes prevention of sarcopenia and osteoporosis. However, this approach is not quite correct. In that these hormones have many functions, and by giving them to people, we are not only affecting the positive aspects of the body's functioning, but also harming it from the other side. For example, when exposed to these hormones, the prostate grows, blood pressure rises, and fluid retention occurs.
It is for these reasons that science has decided to change the approach to treating sarcopenia. I have already written about selective androgen receptor modulators (SARMs). In a nutshell, they are the same hormones, but they act selectively (there is no full selectivity of course, it is roughly speaking partial). For example, these drugs trigger the growth of muscle and bone mass, but do not touch the growth of prostate. Sounds like a miracle pill (especially for jocks), but no, out of all the drugs of this type only one of them is going through the second phase of clinical trials (and with covid vaccines it was not so slow 😆). That's ostarine. But this fact does not prevent various "basement" factories from making and selling this drug on the black market. As of today, a lot of athletes have been caught taking this drug (especially Russian athletes have distinguished themselves). The drug has a really positive effect on muscle mass and may be a promising official drug for sarcopenia in the future. Besides ostarine, there are other working SARMs, for example, this is ligandrol. It is also a good drug for sarcopenia.
TGF-b and myostatin inhibitors are an even newer approach to treating sarcopenia. I have already written about TGF-b on my Instagram, I will not repeat myself. Briefly, it is a protein under the influence of which tissue cells go to apoptosis (suicide) and in their place comes connective tissue (the same collagen, hello cosmetologists 😉). So, if you suppress TGF-b, you can save working muscle cells (and not just muscle, men go bald through TGF-b), and thus slow down sarcopenia. This is the method I use, in my preventative medicine, also in relation to myself 😉.
Speaking of myostatitis, it's a protein that suppresses muscle growth. For some reason, the body needs this function, but in old age, this protein becomes so abundant that no muscle growth occurs. All of the above remedies affect this protein. However, scientists were not enough and in the late 90s began to conduct research on the creation of an inhibitor of myostatin. It also turned out that some natural substances affect it (for example, sulforaphane, about which I have already written). There are successful developments in this direction, but they have different side effects.
For example peptide Follistatin-344, however this peptide suppresses follicle stimulating hormone, thus grows muscle but makes testicles or ovaries atrophy 🤔 So there's a reason you need this myostatin...
In the MRI images below, you can see a comparison of the thigh muscles of a young and an elderly person. If you don't want to have the same flabby muscles in your old age, remember exercise and nutrition alone can't fool nature 😉
