Sarcopenia Essay

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What are muscle wasting diseases? Sarcopenia is a degenerative condition causing the gradual loss of skeletal muscle mass resulting in decreased strength, which can have pronounced effects on the lives of the elderly What do we use and why? Mouse myoblast cells (C2C12) grow quickly and are easily treated with polyamines. Who is effected? Sarcopenia affects up to 60% of individuals over 80 years of age and is associated with increased disability (13). Furthermore, sarcopenia associated with aging is an important public health issue as it contributes to impaired physical function, increased risk of falls and fractures, dependency and even death. In 2007 alone, 5 out of every 100,000 males ages 5-24 years were affected with muscular dystrophy2. How will it help people? A deeper understanding of the mechanism through which testosterone alters growth of myocytes would allow researchers to potentially employ a treatment with the same efficacy but without the side effects. It is likely that the aging population will suffer from Treatment with 10 nM TBA significantly (P > 0.05) increases the …show more content…

However, individuals suffering from muscle wasting conditions, such as sarcopenia, cannot use TBA to treat their condition due to undesirable side effects. Recent research indicates that testosterone enhances skeletal muscle growth through alterations to the polyamine (PA) biosynthetic pathway. In order to determine the role that testosterone and polyamines have on skeletal muscle growth, we treated mouse myoblast cells (C2C12) with differing concentrations of TBA, the PA precursor ornithine (ORN), and the three polyamines: putrescine (PUT), spermidine (SPD) and spermine (SPE) and analyzed proliferation rate. We hypothesize muscle cell cultures induced to differentiate in the presence of ornithine, putrescine, spermidine and spermine will have enhanced

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