Muscles require motion to stay healthy, but that doesn’t mean pumping iron at the gym. The movements people make as they go about their daily lives give muscles the exercise they need, but when this baseline amount of movement becomes unattainable, bodies suffer the consequences.
While bed rest after injury, surgery, or illness is often restorative, this downtime leads to muscle atrophy. “It's really hard to recover, especially as an older adult, from this period of disuse,” said Marni Boppart, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “We wanted to try to develop a novel therapy to help with the regrowth process after that period of disease.”
Boppart researches the factors that regulate skeletal muscle growth and remodeling during exercise and rehabilitation. After periods of extended rest where muscles are immobilized, resuming movement causes reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation. ROS ...
