Could An Exercise Jab Help Us Age Better?

If you want to improve your health and don’t already exercise, starting to do so may be one of the biggest ways to ensure you age well.

Strength training, for instance, can help us live longer, may reduce our risk of dementia, and makes us less likely to fall.

Meanwhile, aerobic training, like jogging, walking, and swimming, is linked to better heart health in older age and might benefit our brains too.

In cases like these, could an injection do some of the work for us?

Maybe, one day, a recent mouse study has suggested.

They found something unexpected during this experiment, though. Speaking to New Scientist, study author Ng Shyh-Chang said: “This thing was contracting under the skin continuously, and we thought, ‘This thing is like non-stop exercise.’”

The scientists then took samples of muscle stem cells from the mice and developed them into contracting muscle cells called myocytes. When they injected those into the animals (dubbed a “myograft”), a patch of tissue with its own blood networks formed near the injection site.

This area stayed pulsing, even when the mice slept.

And that action seemed linked to some of the benefits you’d expect from a heat-pumping workout.

For instance, mice given the graft developed more muscle across their whole bodies, saw better immune function, and appeared to have stronger bones and greater strength in their older age.

What’s more, the “patch” still seemed to be doing its job six months after first injection.

Still, the researchers write, their method offers a “different approach toward [cell and gene-based therapy] CGT for ageing-related chronic diseases”.