Stem cell study may result in stronger muscles in old age

You will need this so ask your doctor for followup to get this for you.
https://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=183930&CultureCode=en

23 February 2018 Karolinska Institutet

As we grow older, our muscular function declines. A new study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows how an unexpectedly high number of mutations in the stem cells of muscles impair cell regeneration. This discovery may result in new medication to build stronger muscles even when in old age. The study is published in Nature Communications.

It has already been established that natural ageing impairs the function of our skeletal muscles. We also know that the number and the activity of the muscles’ stem cells decline with age. However, the reasons for this has not been fully understood. In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have investigated the number of mutations that accumulate in the muscle's stem cells (satellite cells).

“What is most surprising is the high number of mutations. We have seen how a healthy 70-year-old has accumulated more than 1,000 mutations in each stem cell in the muscle, and that these mutations are not random but there are certain regions that are better protected,” explains Maria Eriksson, Professor at the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition at Karolinska Institutet.

The mutations occur during natural cell division, and the regions that are protected are those that are important for the function or survival of the cells. Nonetheless, the researchers were able to identify that this protection declines with age.

“We can demonstrate that this protection diminishes the older you become, indicating an impairment in the cell's capacity to repair their DNA. And this is something we should be able to influence with new drugs,” explains Maria Eriksson.

The researchers have benefited from new methods to complete the study. The study was performed using single stem cells cultivated to provide sufficient DNA for whole genome sequencing.

“We achieved this in the skeletal muscle tissue, which is absolutely unique. We have also found that there is very little overlap of mutations, despite the cells being located close to each other, representing an extremely complex mutational burden,” explains the study's first author, Irene Franco, Postdoc in Maria Eriksson’s research group.

The researchers will now continue their work to investigate whether physical exercise can affect the number of accumulated mutations. Is it true that physical exercise from a young age clears out cells with many mutations, or does it result in the generation of a higher number of such cells?

“We aim to discover whether it is possible to individually influence the burden of mutations. Our results may be beneficial for the development of exercise programmes, particularly those designed for an ageing population,” explains Maria Eriksson.

The researchers gained access to the muscle tissue used in the study via a close collaboration with clinical researchers, including Helene Fischer at the Unit for Clinical Physiology at Karolinska University Hospital.

The study has been a cooperative project between researchers at Karolinska Institutet, Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab), Uppsala University, Linköping University and Stockholm University, in addition to several affiliated institutes in Italy.

The research is financed by the Swedish Research Council, CIMED (Centre for Innovative Medicine), the David and Astrid Hagelén Foundation, the Swedish Society of Medicine, the Gun and Bertil Stohnes Foundation, the Osterman Foundation, the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, Wallenberg Advanced Bioinformatics Infrastructure and the EU Commission funding programme, Marie Skłodowska-Curie.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03244-6

Attached files

• 
  Irene Franco, Postdoc, and Maria Eriksson, Professor, Karolinska Institutet. Photo: Ulf Sirborn

  ---

• Full bibliographic information”Somatic mutagenesis in satellite cells associates with human skeletal muscle aging”. Irene Franco, Anna Johansson, Karl Olsson, Peter Vrtačnik, Pär Lundin, Hafdis T. Helgadottir, Malin Larsson, Gwladys Revêchon,Carla Bosia, Andrea Pagnani, Paolo Provero, Thomas Gustafsson, Helene Fischer, Maria Eriksson. Nature Communications, online 23 February 2018, doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-03244-6.

New understanding of how muscles work

Your doctor, if ANY GOOD AT ALL, can use this to explain and correct your malfunctioning muscles.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=178318&CultureCode=en

23 August 2017 McGill University

Zooming in on muscle mechanics

Muscle malfunctions may be as simple as a slight strain after exercise or as serious as heart failure and muscular dystrophy. A new technique developed at McGill now makes it possible to look much more closely at how sarcomeres, the basic building blocks within all skeletal and cardiac muscles, work together. It's a discovery that should advance research into a wide range of muscle malfunctions.

Talk about finicky work

Sarcomeres are the smallest unit within a muscle in which all the molecules responsible for making a muscle work can be found intact. These minuscule structures, about one hundred times smaller in diameter than an average human hair, work cooperatively to produce force during muscle contraction. Scientists have known for some time that when muscles are active many million sarcomeres work together, and that muscle malfunctions can be due, at least in part, to miscommunication between sarcomeres. But how exactly this communication takes place has been a mystery until now. Because no one before has been able to isolate a single sarcomere, watch it in action, and measure what's going on.
"It was very, very tricky and sometimes frustrating for the students working on this project over the last few years," says Dilson Rassier who teaches in the Department of Kinesiology at McGill and is the lead researcher on the study that was recently published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. "We used micro-fabricated needles to measure force and high-tech microscopy to isolate the sarcomeres and then watch them contracting. One of our collaborators had to develop a mathematical model to analyze the data because the numbers involved were so minuscule and so precise."

Zooming in on microscopic mini-muscles in action

There are between 2,000 and 2,500 sarcomeres found together in linked coils in each 10 millimetres of muscle fibre. To watch the sarcomeres in action, the researchers first had to isolate a single myofibril (the basic rod-like units which make up muscle tissue) and then zoom in on an individual sarcomere. They then experimented with different concentrations of calcium (which is responsible for triggering muscle activation and relaxation) to cause the sarcomeres to contract and measure their force.

What they discovered was that, in a healthy myofibril, all the neighbouring sarcomeres adjust to the activation of one single sarcomere. This finding is new and provocative, showing a cooperative mechanism among sarcomeres in a myofibril that is linked to the specific properties of sarcomeric molecules. This inter-sarcomere dynamic is crucial for the understanding of the molecular mechanism of contraction.

Rassier sounds exultant about the findings: "My group had to work hard to conclude this study, but the results were worth it. The technique opens many possibilities in the muscle field. Since we published our findings a few weeks ago I've been hearing from biophysicists and physiologists from around the world who are excited about it. Our next step is to look into what happens in heart failure and other diseases of the muscular system when sarcomeres fail to cooperate."

Funding was provided by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq, Brazil) and the Canada Research Chair Program.
http://www.pnas.org/content/114/33/8794.abstract

• Full bibliographic informationTo read "Microfluidic perfusion shows intersarcomere dynamics within single skeletal muscle myofibrils", by Felipe de Souza Leite et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1700615114: http://www.pnas.org/content/114/33/8794.abstract

Artificial Muscle Capable of ‘Remembering’ Movements Developed

Would this be helpful for your recovery? Send you doctor after this to see what might be useful to you.
http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2014/11/artificial-muscle-capable-%E2%80%98remembering%E2%80%99-movements-developed?
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed artificial muscles which can learn and recall specific movements, the first time that motion control and memory have been combined in a synthetic material.

 

The ‘muscles’, made from smooth plastic, could eventually be used in a wide range of applications where mimicking the movement of natural muscle would be an advantage, such as robotics, aerospace, exoskeletons and biomedical applications.

 

Although artificial muscles (actuators) and polymers that can remember shapes exist, movement and memory have not yet been incorporated in the same material. Now, University of Cambridge researchers have produced such a material, known as polymeric electro-mechanical memory (EMM). Details are published in the journal Materials Chemistry C.

 

The movement of the artificial muscle developed by the Cambridge researchers, can be manipulated, stored, read, and restored independently. It can store, learn, and later recall, a variety of different movements.

 

Muscles are the bundles of cells which make movement in animals possible. There are three different types of muscle in vertebrates such as ourselves: the cardiac muscles of the heart, the involuntary muscles which regulate the movements of organs, such as the intestine and bladder, and the muscles which produce voluntary movement at joints and on the face.

 

If a movement in voluntary muscle is repeated enough times, a type of muscle ‘memory’ is developed. For example, a violinist practising the same passage over and over will eventually be able to perform the passage without needing to think about it: the brain develops a procedural memory of the passage, and can quickly instruct the fingers to perform the correct movements. This sort of unconscious movement learned through repetition is known as muscle memory, and is something we use every day: when riding a bicycle, for instance.

 

Most artificial muscles are made of polymers which change size or shape when they receive an electrical signal. Through a number of mechanisms and stimuli, movement reasonably approximating natural muscles can be reproduced in an artificial material.

 

“Muscles in animals have the ability to both control motion and develop muscle memory in the same tissue, but reproducing these multiple functions in an artificial muscle has not been possible until now,” said Dr Stoyan Smoukov of the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, who led the research.

 

After chemically modifying thin strips of a bendable, commercially-available material which is used in batteries and fuel cells, the researchers then programmed a variety of shapes at different temperatures and taught the artificial muscle to ‘remember’ the movement associated with each shape. The movements can later be recovered one-by-one, on demand, by going back to the temperature which was used to programme it.

 

The shape and movement transformations are reversible: the restored states can be cycled thousands of times using low voltage inputs (between one and two volts). These low voltages and the potential biocompatibility of the muscles could lead to bio-implantable devices. The researchers also analysed the dependence of the movement on the amount of mechanical programming, and the mechanism underlying the muscles’ behaviour.

 

Based on the success of the proof-of-concept material they developed, the Cambridge researchers are now developing a general methodology to create muscles which incorporate different types of functionality.

 

Source: University of Cambridge

How many hours of therapy do you need to do to recover from a stroke?

Malcolm Gladwell's highly popular book, Outliers, estimates 10,000 hours as the time it takes to become a high-level athlete or musician.
First you would need to accurately know how many muscles were affected by your stroke, split between just damaged in the penumbra and the dead ones. I'm sure your neurologist has no f*cking clue as to the answer to that question.
The damaged ones are the only ones counted here

A (slightly tongue-in-cheek) tally of the body’s many muscles

The grand total

Well, this is how I calculate it. We have …

• 200 muscles that might get discussed in a gym
• 100 more muscles that are pretty obscure, but any self-respecting massage therapist still knows about them
• 400 more muscles that are really danged obscure, but various specialists know about them, and a handful of them are of special interest
• several million hair-raising muscles
• several billion smooth muscles cells blended together
• exactly 1 heart muscle

So I’m going to go with a grand total of approximately 50,100,000,701 muscles, accurate to within 99%.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let's say you blew out all of your motor cortex on one side and taking the first three bullets that would mean 350 muscles needing retraining.
I'll make it simple and assume that there is one specific exercise for each muscle, Think of body builders and what they do to get that definition.
350 * 10,000 = 3.5 million hours needed to totally recover.
24 hours a day * 365 days = 8760 hours in a year
If you worked constantly all year you might be able to recover one muscle
3.5m/8760 = 399.54 years before you are completely recovered and you are not going to be able to ever sleep again. Lots of Red Bulls for you.
And do you really think your therapist has stroke protocols for each voluntary muscle in the body?

This is why the rehabilitation silo as currently set up is not where the solution to stroke recovery is. The solution is preventing neuronal death in the first week. Then rehabilitation might have a chance to get people to recovery. 

I look forward to therapists and neurologists around the world telling me exactly why I'm wrong and providing exact calculations for recovery.  That'll be the day, by Buddy Holly.