Towards an Exercise Pill 362
aztektum among many other readers sent us news that medical researchers have developed two drugs that can build muscle tone in mice without exercise. While such an advance may inspire dreams of a "couch potato pill," the article mostly talks about other medical uses, should the drugs prove safe and effective in humans. The doctor in charge of the research is working with sports authorities to develop a test to detect the drugs in athletes. "Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that they had found two drugs that did wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice's endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment. A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect. 'It's a little bit like a free lunch without the calories,' said Dr. Ronald M. Evans, leader of the Salk group."
The heart muscle? (Score:5, Interesting)
What about the type of muscle tissue found in the heart? Could this be used to help rebuild a heart that's been weakened by a heart attack?
Re:Better Living Through Chemistry (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Better Living Through Chemistry (Score:5, Interesting)
Kind of like today, but in reverse.
Universal Soldier anyone ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Countertop meat machine (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't the biggest problem (ok, biggest technical problem) with in vitro meat [wikipedia.org] the fact that the muscle tissue that it grows can't get any exercise and is therefore soft and textureless?
Couldn't this help with that problem?
Pill would save lives. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, the death rate for liposuction is about 19 deaths per 100,000 operations. (Note, this compares with a death rate of only 1 death per 100,000 elective surgeries, so it is rather poor).
If the pill actually works, and eliminates liposuction, that is quite a few lives saved, not to mention plastic surgeons that are freed up to do the "burn remedies and birth defects that are the reason we got into this buisness" (cue eyebrow raise here).
Space Exploration Applications? (Score:5, Interesting)
Presuming that this will be safe for use in humans, could this be one of the missing keys for space exploration? I'm imagining Joe Astronaut wakes from his month-long slumber on route to Planet X. His muscles have atrophied over this time, but by using these pills and doing some remedial exercise, he is ready to face the perils of the alien planet in days!
I 3 the future.
my prediction: cell death!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't based totally on science, just the assumption that anything too good to be true usually is.
There are a couple of principles I might be getting wrong here, please correct me on that.
1. Mammalian hearts all tend to have a lifespan of x number of beats. The slower the heart beats, the longer-lived the critter is. This explains why small, jumpy rodents tend to have short lives and something like a whale is long-lived. This x number seems to be fairly consistent across species.
2. Scientists have shown that restricted calorie diets in mice will lengthen their lives and they believe this will hold true for humans as well. The more you eat, the sooner you die.
3. Exercise has more components than just body movement. Muscles are strengthened through use by the tearing of muscle fibers and the healing process of repairing those tears. There's been talk of direct electric stimulation of muscles to prevent atrophy, first brought up for long space voyages, later depicted in the first Matrix movie when they had the freshly decanted Neo done up like a pin-cushion.
My assumption is that this drug will turn out to be something like steroids. Do steroids work? Absolutely! All other conditions being equal, the athlete who uses steroids will typically outperform the athlete who remains clean. Of course, the one who remains clean will also retain important things like testicles, non-lactating breasts, and a future.
Useful for those extra terrestrial nerds (Score:2, Interesting)
My thought on first seeing this was you could use this for extended space flights add in something for bone density loses and the first guy to walk on mars won't need a walker.
Re:my prediction: cell death!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
1) If it's true your heart beating slower extends it's life, than it would pay to exercise to strenthen your heart. A stronger heart beats less at rest.
2) A restricted calorie diet helps you live longer because certain cells in your body can only reproduce so many times. Cells stop dividing because the telomeres, protective bits of DNA on the end of a chromosome, become shorter with each division and eventually can no longer protect the chromosome (quoted from Wikipedia).
3) If muscle cells can be coaxed through gene therapy to grow without the need to tear and than heal said cells, you wouldn't need to waste so much time doing useless exercise. The key is to find the genes/compounds that regulate metabolism and cellular growth, so you could have a healthy, fit body without wasting hours and hours a week running, bicycling, etc (unless you enjoy that thing, I'd prefer to be coding, designing electrical circuits, etc).
Couch Potato Solution == TENS machine (Score:1, Interesting)
This came out long ago. It's called a TENS machine. Hook yourself up and passively be made into a beef-cake.
Best application isn't for the lazy (Score:2, Interesting)
Performance Enhancing Nightmare (Score:3, Interesting)
Instead of ignoring the facts regarding drugs and basing your beliefs on ignorance, there are a HUGE list of issues that arise as a result of ignoring pharmacology in sport.
*Minor league versions of the sport are then required to take drugs. Impossible! you exclaim. The minors are for preparing/selecting for the majors. Part of your preparation now includes pharmacology because your performance will not vaguely resemble professional level performances without them.
*The system that feeds the minor league system is then required to take drugs. Pharmacology driven performances become the norm. How do you maintain a boundary between pharma/no pharma performances?
Very quickly this will become an issue of children taking performance enhancing drugs, which is already happening. Impossible! Well, then please explain how EXACTLY high school -> college football(u.s.) players balloon in size and weight in less than 1 year? And then the next jump from college to pro creates more impossible body metrics.
If you can't tollerate my complex reasoing, then look at sports pharma as a way to fix every game played. I can pick winners and losers by giving one team pharma X and giving the other pharma Y. I can pick a World Series winner at the beginning of the season just that easily. Impossible you say? Well ask Bjarne Riis about doping his way into a Le Tour victory.
I would like to know what the medical purpose of this pharma is and who is paying for the research. With EPO, there's a legitimate purpose.
Re:Better Living Through Chemistry (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that it unbalances the game.
If everyone was taking steroids, you'd have to greatly extend the outfield so as to keep the game from becoming even more of a home run contest than it currently is. And, since steroids don't make you that much faster (as compared to how much further you can hit a ball), outfielders wouldn't be able to cover all that extra room, and batting averages would skyrocket.
There are a few problems with this. One is that we really don't know that steroids make everyone a much better baseball player. If you look at the list of players who've been suspended [baseball-almanac.com] you see a lot of names like Matt Lawton and Mike Morse, and not too many stars. Maybe this just means that the stars can afford untraceable stuff, but we don't really know. But really, and this surprises people, there is very little proof that steroids really help a player become better, and, even if we assume they do, little explanation of how they do it. Is it pure strength? An increase in hand-eye coordination? Some people suggest they improve vision. Can they work with all people equally? If not, why, and who benefits most?
More importantly, baseball can be changed very significantly with fairly small adjustments to the rules that govern it. An adjustment in the height of the pitcher's mound after the 1968 season increased scoring by about a run a game. Juiced balls dramatically increased run scoring for one season in both 1930 and 1987. The Colorado Rockies have radically changed the offensive environment of their ballpark in large part by changing the method in which they store baseballs (they keep them in a humidor now).
There are all sorts of things that could be done to "deaden" the game. Mandate a minimum thickness of bat handles -- whip-handled bats allow incredibly quick swings. Deaden the ball if you want. Raise the mound. Enforce a larger strike zone. Force batters to stay in the batter's box, and don't let them wear Craig Biggio-style body armor so they have to worry about getting hit if they lunge over the plate. Call it a strike if they get hit over the plate, or if they make no effort to get out of the way. Limit the amount of times a pitcher can throw to first with a runner on, encouraging base stealing and making speedy, athletic players more valuable than lumbering sluggers. Etc., etc.
Bill James runs through these ideas and more in his Historical Baseball Abstract. As James says, with only small changes in the equipment and rules, baseball has been a game of 10-9 slugfests and of 3-2 bunt and steal games. It could be either one now, but Major League Baseball thinks that home runs bring profits. So that's what we've got.
Re:Nerd Decisions... (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft only needed 2 generations to make a Zune MP3 player that is better and has more features than a 7th generation iPod.
I thought of marking you insightful. But then I figured responding would be better.
He's got a point - a Zune is more featured (wireless sharing, bigger screen, built-in FM radio) than the 7th gen iPod, and is cheaper (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16855604016 vs http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16855101072 [newegg.com]).
Disclaimer: I have an iPod, and like it (though don't like Apple products, for the most part). Am no Microsoft shill, let alone fanboi.
You can buy it right now (Score:4, Interesting)
Aicar is a common research chemical, and all it takes is a click [caymanchem.com] to purchase some Aicar. The price may prevent most people from using is as a nutritional supplement though..
Re:Not necessarily (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, if you fake the signal which says, basically, "oi, we're doing lots of contracting here, we need more muscle fibers!", you'll get just that.
Yes and no. In addition to chemical signals which move raw materials into place to construct new muscle, you also rely on physical damage to the muscles that tell normal housekeeping cells to clean up, and begin laying new tissue (unless you have not finished puberty). This new tissue is (hopefully) bigger and therefore stronger.
The article didn't go into much detail, and they keep referring to muscle "tone", which is really a different thing than raw muscle. I'm still skeptical of the use of such a drug unless it is accompanied by actual exercise and used as simply a stimulant to improved muscle creation and repair.
Re:Better Living Through Chemistry (Score:3, Interesting)
Because all drugs have side effects. I suspect this one is going to have some rather major ones too. It sounds like the drugs increase endurance, not necessarily strength. Increasing endurance involves all sorts of things, one of which is angiogenesis. Guess what's really good at encouraging angiogenesis? Malignant tumors.