What we are seeing today is a BBSRC-funded project which is about the limits of exercise
tolerance and it's in a general context of ageing.
Although the study we are looking at today is of a young fit healthy subject, we are
looking at the ways to understand the mechanisms that change with age and to understand what
the effects they have on the function of the body.
This is Matt he is one of our participants, we have been performing the exercise tests
on him today and he will be exercising inside the bore of the magnet and what we are interested
in is looking at how his body responds to that external work that he is doing on the
ergometer.
We will then integrate those measures we have made of his oxygen uptake, with measurements
we take in the magnet of the phosphates what is happening with the phosphates within the
working muscles.
So that is the line I have just acquired from Matt and it looks pretty good.
It has the display parameters on there so that I can zoom in on the central peak the
phosphate-creatine peak.
Option uptake is quite slow to respond to a change in the energy demand in the working
muscle.
So we need an energy system that buffers that shortfall in the oxygen of energy that is
being provided by the working muscles, and phosphates is a way to do that.
While I have been acting as a participant I have also been running the project.
So I am a Masters student with Carrie as my supervisor, so I have been helping on the
ground doing the experiments, collecting the data and interacting with the participants,
recruiting them and building good relationships with them.
Because there are quite a number of tests in this, and a crossover of various sites
so you get a good deal of time to build good relationships with your participants which
is really good.
The wider context of this work is the ageing populations, the social and economic and of
course the personal problems which result from the extraordinary increase in longevity
that we have seen.
The essential thing is that if you are going to live for a long time you need to live a
healthy life and you need to be as mobile as possible.
The tests that you would have seen today is just one of a series of experiments that they
will do within the magnet and they will differ in difficulty and by doing that we can again
look at how effectively the way muscles are using oxygen, using phosphates to general
energy and all that is linked into exercise tolerance.
So an important question is what can be done about these processes of ageing.
And obviously in general there are nutritional approaches you can consider; there are pharmacological
approaches and there is the very important area you can call exercise prescription in
the broadest sense so increasing in activity, training if you like.
With this project if we can understand more about the mechanisms that are limiting that
exercise tolerance we can begin to understand how we can design interventions to a positive
impact.
Part of what we want to do is understand what are the likely effects of manipulating particular
parts of that system.
Again this is where our integrated approach comes in we cannot do all the experiments
that we would want to do; we aspire to build a model which will enable us to predict the
beneficial effects of a particular manipulations.
So are there drug approaches to build muscle mass?
Well, there are a number of these things which are being discussed at the moment.
To what extent will that benefit in terms of the activities of daily life?
You can only do those experiments and answer the question one of the things we hope to
do here is to be able to predict what is likely to be a fruitful avenue to follow.