Exercise and Dietary-Protein as a Countermeasure to Skeletal Muscle Weakness: Liverpool Hope University – Sarcopenia Aging Trial (LHU-SAT)

Conclusion: Concurrent exercise (RE + FE) offers a potent method to combat age-related muscle weakness, and our results suggest a high proportion of older adults may continue to exercise unsupervised. However, leucine-enriched whey protein isolate supplementation did not confer any additional benefit in those already consuming ample amounts of dietary protein at trial enrolment. Future trials should utilize a whole-foods approach and investigate the effects in frail and non-frail older adults habitually consuming the RDA of protein, to assess if a higher intake of protein is needed to delay the onset of muscle weakness. Trial Registration: Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT02912130. Introduction The aging epidemic has led to increased awareness of frailty phenotypes, notably muscle weakness (Fried et al., 2001), which manifests around 50 years of age, and occurs at a 2–5 times more rapid rate than muscle mass loss (Goodpaster et al., 2006). In the United Kingdom alone, estimated annual costs attributed to muscle weakness are $2.5 billion (Pinedo-Villanueva et al., 2018) which emphasizes the urgent need for prevention strategies. Two prophylactics suggested to curtail muscle weakness are resistance exercise (RE) and dietary-protein. RE is a potent stimulus to increase muscle strength and physical functioning (Fiatarone et al., 1990; Stec et al., 2017) whilst epidemiological data show higher quantities of dietary-protein (>1 g/kg/day) can curb declines in grip ...
Source: Frontiers in Physiology - Category: Physiology Source Type: research