A shot of strength
Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that gene therapy in mice helps to quickly build muscle mass, while reducing the severity of osteoarthritis. Gene therapy also prevented obesity, even when mice were fed fatty foods.
Physical exercises and physical therapy are often recommended for people with arthrosis. Both help to strengthen the muscles, leading to a reduction in joint pain. But building muscle mass can take a long time, especially in the presence of arthrosis-related joint pain, in the elderly and overweight people.
In a new study on mice, gene therapy accelerated the build-up of muscle mass and reduced the severity of osteoarthritis. The effect persisted even after the cessation of training. The therapy also prevented obesity, even when the mice were fed extremely fatty foods.
It is known that obesity is the most common risk factor for osteoarthritis; being overweight prevents a person from exercising and making full use of physical therapy.
The research team gave 8-week-old mice one injection containing adenoassociated viral vectors carrying the FST gene, which encodes the synthesis of the follistatin protein. This protein blocks the activity of the activin protein in the muscles, which controls their growth. This allowed the mice to gain significant muscle mass without exercising more than usual.
Even without additional exercises and with the preservation of a fatty diet, the muscle mass of the "super mice" has more than doubled, their strength has also almost doubled. They had a decrease in cartilage tissue damage characteristic of osteoarthritis, a decrease in the number of inflammatory cells and proteins in the joints, and normalization of metabolism. The heart and blood vessels of these mice were healthier than those of mice from the same litter that did not receive gene therapy. The experimental animals were also significantly less sensitive to pain.
The concern is that the muscle growth caused by gene therapy may be harmful. For example, the heart is a muscle, and hypertrophy of the heart departments accompanies many diseases. But in the experimental mice, the function of the heart actually improved, as well as the cardiovascular system as a whole.
The safety of this type of gene therapy should be studied in larger and longer-term studies. If successful, the strategy can be especially useful for patients with muscular dystrophy, in which the growth of new muscles is difficult.
Nevertheless, the authors note that currently more traditional methods of strengthening muscles, such as weight lifting or physiotherapy, remain in the first place in the treatment of patients with osteoarthritis.
Article P.Tang et al. Gene therapy for follistatin mitigates systemic metabolic inflammation and post-traumatic arthritis in high-fat diet–induced obesity is published in the journal Science Advances.
Aminat Adzhieva, portal "Eternal Youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on WUSTL materials: Gene therapy in mice builds muscle, reduces fat.