Philip Kern - So you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in health economics to know that the
baby boom generation is aging and with aging you have lots of physical disability, centered
around our infrastructure, our muscle, our skeleton. Nobody wants to be an invalid. This
study is critical. If we can come up with ways to help this process, it will be extraordinarily
cost effective in terms of taking care of people, but also it will help people have
a much better quality of life.
Charlotte Peterson - Being able to stand up out of a chair, to be able to lift your groceries
out of the trunk of the car, to be able to continue to live independently, is the goal
that everybody has. And maintaining muscle, maintaining strength, is the key to that.
So trying to find ways to make that more effective
and make it easier for people is the goal of our work.
Scientists at the University of Kentucky and University of Alabama at Birmingham have joined
forces to see if the most prescribed diabetes drug
Metformin. . can help older adults gainmuscle mass.
Philip Kern - Metformin has been used to treat diabetes for several decades.
Charlotte Peterson - It’s the first line of defense in diabetics, and it is very effective
in reducing blood sugar. There had been a lot of studies in animals as well as in humans
noting that it had some beneficial effects.
Philip Kern - One of our hypotheses is that Metformin also has a positive effect to help
muscle remodel. So if you’re exercising, you’re trying to build muscle, but your
muscle has to be able to adapt and remodel in response to that exercise, and that’s
a normal physiologic process. Some people don’t remodel their muscle and don’t build
muscle as well as others, elderly people in particular.
Charlotte Peterson - It’s going along with this new idea of precision medicine, that
exercise doesn’t work as well for all people, and that maybe if we can find things we can
add on to exercise that would make everybody respond better, that this would be a really
good thing. Give people the drug or a placebo, have them undergo a training regiment for
three months lifting weights, and then we just measure their muscle mass, and their
strength gains, to try to see if Metformin is beneficial and will help older people gain
more mass and strength when they exercise.
I have been doing studies in elderly individuals and trying to help them maintain function
and prevent frailty, and I’ve had a colleague for many years who’s at the University of
Alabama at Birmingham, Marcas Bamman. We’ve noticed this phenomenon in our older subjects
that when they do a weight lifting protocol, some benefit greatly and others do not.
And so, we joined forces and combined our data and are now working together
Philip Kern - We have significant strength in clinical and translational research through
our CTSA. We have strength in diabetes and in metabolism in muscle biology. So I think
it really leverages all of these different strengths and puts it together in one grant.
Charlotte Peterson - We had noted a feature of muscle that we thought might cause it to
be more adaptable to exercise. We began to look in human muscle biopsies that we’ve
taken from our research subjects, and started to note that the same differences were appearing
in their muscles at the cellular and molecular level following training, those people with
these features in their muscles seemed to gain the most mass and strength. And then,
through studies from our lab as well as many other labs, what we discovered was the drug
Metformin seemed to promote these changes in muscles. So it’s sort of like putting
A+B=C, so we put it together and thought, “Maybe by giving people this drug before
they start to exercise, it would help their muscles then be able to adapt more readily.”
So it’s really combining very mechanistic studies on muscle, now applying those things
that we’ve learned to people in an exercise trial.
Philip Kern -The most exciting part of this study is looking at the participants who are
in the study who are truly excited, and who really love to be here. They’re getting
stronger. They enjoy coming three times a week to pump some iron, and seeing the enthusiasm
and the excitement in the eyes of the participants is really truly gratifying.
VO: Scientists across the country are looking at Metformin as an anti-cancer and anti-aging
treatment, and Drs. Kern and Peterson are eager to contribute
to this emerging national initiative.
Charlotte Peterson - So we could be a part of this really large initiative to try to
determine if Metformin may be one of the first drugs given just as an anti-aging drug. I
feel like there’s a lot just on the horizon in terms of trying to help older people maintain
their quality of life and that being part of that and trying to contribute to that knowledge
base is very exciting to me.