Health Discovery: Lift Weights for Stronger Muscles, Stronger Brains - AARP Bulletin

by: Candy Sagon | from: AARP Bulletin

For older women, the type of exercise you do may be more important than how often you do it.

That's the message of a surprising new study by Canadian researchers that found that women who started a once-a-week strength-training program were more likely to stick with it — and reap the physical and mental benefits — than those who started a twice-a-week program.

More importantly, older women who built muscle strength through biceps curls, leg lifts, squats and the like showed much greater improvement in mental focus and ability to make decisions and resolve conflicts than women who did only balance and toning exercises.
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Treating the Loss of Muscle, or Sarcopenia, of Aging - NYTimes.com

Image via CrunchBaseby Toby Bilanow

Loss of muscle mass affects about 10 percent of men and women over 60 and is a major reason the elderly lose mobility and cannot live independently, researchers say. Now they are looking for ways to prevent or reverse the condition. As Andrew Pollack of The New York Times writes:
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Potential For A Muscle-Preserving Therapy

from Medical News Today

Hey guys, remember the muscle shirts we wore in our teens and 20s? After the age of 40 that meager part of our wardrobes usually is obsolete. Yes, at the big 4-0 we begin to lose muscle, and by age 80 up to a third of it may be gone. It's an inevitable process of aging called sarcopenia.

Why does sarcopenia happen and can it be stopped? A study conducted in mice with accelerated muscle loss at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio provides this insight:

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New Finding May Foil Age-Related Muscle Loss

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from Medical News Today

If you're an aging baby boomer hoping for a buffer physique, there's hope. A team of American scientists from Texas and Michigan have made a significant discovery about the cause of age-related muscle atrophy that could lead to new drugs to halt this natural process. This research, available online in the FASEB Journal, shows that free radicals, such as reactive oxygen species, damage mitochondria in muscle cells, leading to cell death and muscle atrophy. Now that scientists understand the cause of age-related muscle loss, they can begin to develop new drugs to halt the process.

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