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Is this the elixir of eternal youth?

Dr Tea Shavlakadze is sceptical. But she is excited about her discoveries in the area of ageing, and the possibility of drug therapy to help keep elderly people's muscles from wasting.

The research fellow in Anatomy and Human Biology and her colleague Professor Miranda Grounds are looking at the mechanisms of muscle ageing and Dr Shavlakadze has been invited by Novartis, one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies, to spend another six months at their research institute in Boston.

Novartis are leaders in research into muscle wasting and Dr Shavlakadze has already spent 12 months in Boston, working on the possibility of drug therapies to slow down sarcopenia (loss of muscle strength and mass).

"It's a huge accolade for somebody who has so recently graduated," Professor Grounds said. She and Dr Shavlakadze wrote a book chapter on skeletal ageing in 2005, just after Professor Grounds had supervised Dr Shavlakadze's PhD, that emphasised the importance of age-related loss of nerve connections to muscles. They have been working on the area since then.

"There is a lot of interest in ageing in the community," Dr Shavlakadze said. "The main focus seems to be on cardiovascular health. But muscle makes up 40 per cent of our body and it is sarcopenia that results in people being unable to move and losing their independence.

"Resistance or weight-bearing exercise is the only way to slow down muscle ageing. But if we can find out what causes innervation, that is, what tells the nerves to ‘let go' of the muscles, we can work on therapies that keep the nerves attached to the muscle, so elderly people can keep moving, slow down sarcopenia, retain some muscle strength and mass, and so their independence."

Such treatments might also be used by bed-ridden patients and HIV-AIDS patients, to help prevent muscle wasting.

"A pill won't be the only answer," Dr Shavlakadze said. "It would still need to be combined with exercise." The medical profession generally agreed that exercise was the only way to slow down sarcopenia but nobody really knew how it worked.

Dr Shavlakadze has been working with mouse models, encouraging life-long exercise to strengthen the nerve-to muscle contact. "Mice just love to run on a wheel and if they have access to a free-spinning wheel all the time, they will just keep on exercising," she said.

"Our preliminary information has shown some definite benefits, but we are still analysing the results."

She said that many humans now lived to 100 years of age, but muscle wasting became pronounced over the last 20 to 30 years, so the quality of many people's lives was greatly reduced.

"We want to improve the quality of life. If we know why muscle ages, why the nerve disconnects, we can create a pill that will work together with exercise to do that."

She said sarcopenia began around the age of 40 but did not become noticeable until about the age of 65. Exercise andother interventions were needed before then to prevent the muscle wasting, rather than trying to treat it later in life.

Dr Shavlakadze and Professor Grounds have published several journal papers over the past few years on therapeutic interventions for age-related muscle wasting.

Published in UWA News , 17 October 2011