Skip to main content

Stem Cells Good for Muscle Wear

Article written by:
Dr. Francisco Arroyo
Medical Director of SportsMed
Sports Medicine & Stem Cell Specialist
Medical | Regenerative Medicine

Stem cells are invisible machines that manage cell growth to repair tissues.

As a natural process of a series of processes that occur in different situations throughout our lives is the loss of muscle. Among these situations we have aging that makes us thinner as we get older, direct trauma that causes, for example, an immobilizer (cast, splint, etc.) to be put on a leg, and when it is removed our limb is much thinner. It may also be that we get sick and at the end of the illness all our muscle mass is gone.

In all these situations we always try to recover by eating well, exercising and resting but the recovery process of our muscles is not that simple, in fact, in patients with knee operations for example, the knee recovers but the muscle volume takes a lot of work to recover and sometimes it even takes months to get a leg more or less presentable from the point of view of strength and muscle volume.

Now a group of researchers from Monash University came to an interesting discovery that can allow the loss of muscle mass in the situations described above to recover more quickly than what has been seen until now.

The research has been carried out until now and the results seem to be promising, the fact is that they discovered a factor that triggers the muscle stem cells to regenerate completing muscle replacement and movement.

When a muscle is torn, the cells and platelets enter to repair it, this occurs in the pathologies described above, as well as in normal day to day wear and tear.

These stem cells are invisible machines that manage cell growth to repair tissues.

Researchers at the Institute of Regenerative Medicine at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia have discovered a factor that causes these cells to fire and go to work to heal muscle damage. Injections of this natural protein causes the muscle to proliferate, repair and completely regenerate muscle after trauma.

Project leader, Professor Peter Currie, published the article in the journal Nature, the study was done on fish called zebrafish because they share 70% of their genes with humans and in case of muscle damage a substance called NAMPT is released, which was also used as a patch on the muscle damage and the result was the same, it accelerated the healing process and muscle recovery.

As a result, researchers are now in talks with a number of biotechnology companies to take this substance to the next level of human clinical research, and who knows? Now us old people will be stronger and perhaps recover faster from the loss of muscle mass.

Article written by:
Dr. Francisco Arroyo – Medical Director of SportMed