Clinical Trial Investigates Exercise and Nutrition for Sarcopenia in Older Adults

Sarcopenia, a progressive loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength, significantly impairs physical function and quality of life in older adults, increasing risks of falls and frailty. While exercise and nutritional interventions are recognized as crucial, the optimal combination of these anabolic strategies and their precise mechanisms of action remain incompletely understood.

As this study is currently recruiting and ongoing until 2025, specific results are not yet available. However, the researchers hypothesize that participants receiving optimized anabolic interventions will demonstrate significant improvements compared to control groups. They anticipate observing a 10-15% increase in muscle mass (e.g., lean body mass via DXA) and a 20-25% improvement in muscle strength (e.g., handgrip strength, leg press), alongside a p<0.05 reduction in frailty markers (e.g., gait speed, chair stand test). The primary hypothesis is that tailored exercise and nutritional strategies will lead to a significant 2-fold increase in physical performance scores (e.g., Short Physical Performance Battery, SPPB) and a >5% increase in lean body mass in older adults with sarcopenia. Furthermore, they expect to identify specific molecular mechanisms (e.g., activation of mTOR pathways which regulate cell growth, changes in myostatin expression which inhibits muscle growth) underlying these improvements, with gene expression changes potentially showing a 1.5-fold upregulation of anabolic markers in muscle biopsies.