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Towards an Exercise Pill
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."
Stand in line for a pill to make me muscular, or stand in line for the new iPhone?
At least the iPhone won't leave me as soon as I talk.
How do you get the couch potatoes to the pharmacy in the first place?
How much does the pill weigh? You can damn well bet I am not going to move my hand to pick up more than 8-10 grams.
If this drug works as advertised & has no dangerous side effects, why wouldn't *everyone* including athletes take it? I realize that this would be an unfair advantage in the present, but I'm talking about after 20+ years of testing.
There is a war going on for your mind.
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?
Not the full extent of the movie, but in one way the same. more powerful by doing nothing. Also, must be noted: good for astronauts when coming back to earth from long "exposure " to microgravity. muscle distrofy
Isn't the biggest problem (ok, biggest technical problem) with in vitro meat 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?
Technoli
I've said it before, but I'll say it again: Never in history has there ever been a better time to be a mouse!
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).
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Once they develop pills for big dicks, fashion sense, personality, and odor elimination, Linux development will cease!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
medical researchers have developed two drugs that can build muscle tone in mice without exercise
The New Scientist article says
Also, it isn't two drugs either one of which do the trick, but two drugs taken together. Not a good summary at all, if the NYT article says the same as the NS article.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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.
Roughly half my comments are never submitted. You may be reading the better half...
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
I want a pill that will improve critical thinking skills! And logical reasoning ability!
And while we are at it, lets make it inhance one's capacity for impartial objectivity when making important decisions.
I would spend my entire life savings on this stuff just to dump it in my city's tap water.
One can dream...
So now modern medicine/technology already allows us to tan without sun, whiten our teeth with lasers, cure impotence, prolong our days without sleep, control anxiety, maintain our cholesterol... and now we don't even have to get off the couch to get exercise? I hope they prescribe these in Pez dispensers because someone is going to pass out trying to open a standard prescription bottle.
While I can see medical uses for this, I think this goes way too far for the average person. What happens when someone's fat and calorie intake increases while this pill makes them fit? "Gee, I don't know why George died of a heart attack at 34. He was taking 3 Aicar pills a day, so he was in great shape."
Nice idea, but I'm not going to hold my breath. My chosen sport is cycling, and I like to ride long distances, the faster the better. If, on top of the training I do, this pill improves my endurance and other attributes similarly to what it did in mice, and it does that with no life-threatening side effects, then I might consider it. However every "miracle drug" that has ever come along has always come up with some long-term side-effects that shorten life spans or even kill you outright. I'll stick to my workouts and training rides for now, thank you very much.
Although I run 5K at least 4-5 times per week and try to do at least a couple of hours of weight lifting per week, I still think that self righteous "eat less, exercise more" preachers are a bunch of jerks.
Every food or weight related story on Slashdot brings these jerks out of the woodwork. They build up their self esteem by criticizing others. Like an anorexic or a bulimic, they have nothing important to be proud of so they build their self esteem on their weight and feel superior to people who are heavier than they are.
Without resorting to a puritan religious justification, how can you argue that a task "should" be difficult? If it's easier for me to be fit than it is for you, does that make you "better" than me?
If a pill can make it easier for you to lose weight and has no adverse effects why shouldn't you use it? Only a religious jerk demands that people should suffer more than necessary.
If one person enjoys rich creamy deserts and another person enjoys basketball how can you attribute "moral" superiority to one or the other. They're both doing things they enjoy. There's absolutely no moral implication that one of those things tends to increase weight and the other tends to decrease weight.
Well, you have to realize that everything in your body is chemistry. No more, no less. All the feedback loops in your body, including "oi, we're doing lots of contracting here, we need more muscle fibers!" or "oi, we're suffocating here, let's have some more blood vessels!" are based on chemical signals. Some chemicals are produced, whether solely as a dedicated hormone/signal, or as a by-product of the cell's normal functions (e.g., CO2.) Some protein binds to them, and does something else. A lot of them regulate the expression of some genes to produce more or less of some other protein, or trigger cell division.
So, yes, if you just force a bunch of cells to divide, you'll get what you wrote.
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. The body doesn't and can't distinguish between the real thing and a faked substance which binds with the same proteins. (Which is why tobacco, marijuana, etc, work, for example. They too bind to some proteins which were meant for something else, but the body can't differentiate between its own canabinoid signals and the THC from hemp.)
Mind you, it doesn't need to be perfect. If the other signals aren't perturbed, the body will still use its other feedback loops for stuff like building blood vessels there or for how many mitochondria it needs there. So you may have some thick muscles, but without the thick veins of real body builders, since they only have to feed those muscles in an unused state. Which isn't a problem, since, well, they do get as much oxygen there as they actually need. You might get faster tired than a real athlete, as a result, though.
But anyway, to cut this rant short and actually answer your question: yes. It would very much help with that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
TFA doesn't say the word "tone" unfortunately and there is a difference. My son was born with Hypotonia which is low muscle tone. When I read the summary I got a little excited thinking this could help him out going forward.
Basically the tone of the muscle is the elasticity of the muscle (this is from memory when the Dr.'s were explaining this to us after he had been diagnosed). It has little to nothing to do with strength and, due to his condition, makes him more prone to hernias and similar problems (he was born with a hernia which was hidden by a communicating hydrocele).
Those with low muscle tone are more flexible (so add that to your GF requirement list :)). My son can touch his shin bone with the top of his foot (try it) as well as do complete splits, etc.
We had to get him orthotics to help his ankles support his weight as he grew. This, fortunately (for him...not for us parental units), has NOT slowed him down. He's currently five and very active...loves to be outdoors and catch bugs...but I digress.
Anyway...thought I'd point that difference out.
The best use is for bed ridden hospital patients. Being able to have patients maintain muscle mass is one of the most difficult things when treating patients with Chemotherapy for example. This drug will revolutionize the field of physical therapy. Shorter rehab times means less time spent in hospitals and big savings. Every over crowded hospital in America should be investing in this research.
The article says that they're using PPAR-delta to change the muscle tissue to the high endurance kind. It also says that one of the things that PPAR-delta can be used for is to instruct cells to burn off fat but it doesn't really say that they're using it for both purposes. So my question is: are we they going to be left with a bunch of people with good muscle tone that are still fat because they didn't exercise? Also, I'd like to point out that we can't even safely make something taste sweet. Why would anyone think something that has this sweeping effects like this is going to be safe?
Real geeks read Cell (with pictures)
DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2008.06.051
http://www.cell.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS0092867408008386
AMPK and PPARÎ Agonists Are Exercise Mimetics
The benefits of endurance exercise on general health make it desirable to identify orally active agents that would mimic or potentiate the effects of exercise to treat metabolic diseases. Although certain natural compounds, such as reseveratrol, have endurance-enhancing activities, their exact metabolic targets remain elusive. We therefore tested the effect of pathway-specific drugs on endurance capacities of mice in a treadmill running test. We found that PPARÎ/Î agonist and exercise training synergistically increase oxidative myofibers and running endurance in adult mice. Because training activates AMPK and PGC1α, we then tested whether the orally active AMPK agonist AICAR might be sufficient to overcome the exercise requirement. Unexpectedly, even in sedentary mice, 4 weeks of AICAR treatment alone induced metabolic genes and enhanced running endurance by 44%. These results demonstrate that AMPK-PPARÎ pathway can be targeted by orally active drugs to enhance training adaptation or even to increase endurance without exercise.
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.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
What this researcher has done is found a way to easily convert one type of muscle fiber "fast twitch" into a different kind "slow twitch" with a drug. The balance of these fibers makes the difference between someone who is decent at sprinting and someone who is decent at a marathon. Normally, training your muscles from fast twitch to slow twitch takes a long training regiment. Primarily, what has been contributed here is a better understanding of the underlying biochemistry. See this article on building muscle.
But note, this isn't going to make you healthier inherently. It'll just make it easier to do longer term, load-bearing workouts without getting tired as easily. You will still get winded just as easily. You will still have to sweat. Your legs will just tell you to stop a little later than normal.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Muscles don't matter very much if you don't have the neurological conditioning to make use of them.
It would be like having a 1000W amplifier with incorrectly set gain or an uncontrolled input voltage.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
so I'd love to take a pill to jump-start me into a condition where I could do 30 pushups and feel fine instead of 10-15 pushups and have my arms feel like rubber. I always end up quitting because I feel like I can't exercise "good enough"
Aicar is a common research chemical, and all it takes is a click to purchase some Aicar. The price may prevent most people from using is as a nutritional supplement though..
Your server got slashdotted again, Rick? better buy more gerbil wheels for that generator!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest