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Exercise: Beneficial Even in Flies
(Wednesday June 24 2009)
 | The weight of evidence indicates exercise to be beneficial to healthy longevity. This would be expected in most species for much the same evolutionary reasons that calorie restriction extends longevity in almost all species. But how do you test that? "Declining mobility is a major concern, as well as a major source of health care costs, among the elderly population. Lack of mobility is a primary cause of entry into managed care facilities, and a contributing factor to the frequency of damaging falls. Exercise-based therapies have shown great promise in sustaining mobility in elderly patients, as well as in rodent models. ... Here, we describe the first exercise-training paradigm in an invertebrate genetic model system. Flies are exercised by a mechanized platform, known as the Power Tower ... When young flies are subjected to a carefully controlled, ramped paradigm of exercise-training, they display significant reduction in age-related decline in mobility and cardiac performance. Fly lines with improved mitochondrial efficiency display some of the phenotypes observed in wild-type exercised flies. ... The development of an exercise-training model in Drosophila melanogaster opens the way to direct testing of single-gene based genetic therapies for improved mobility in aged animals, as well as unbiased genetic screens for loci involved in the changing response to exercise during aging." |
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