Exercise prevents muscle loss as we age: Here's how

• As we age, our strength and mobility decrease, largely due to muscle loss.
• Exercise, particularly resistance training, is widely recommended to help maintain muscle mass during aging.
• Now, a study has discovered how exercise acts at a molecular level to prevent muscle loss as we get older.
• Researchers have found that exercise restores muscle growth by inhibiting a pathway that leads to muscle deterioration and activating proteins that encourage repair.

From age 30, a person’s muscle mass decreases by 3-8% per decade, and this decline accelerates after age 60. Although muscle loss cannot be prevented entirely, we know that an active lifestyle, including strength training, can slow the decline and increase muscle strength, helping people remain mobile and independent for as long as possible.

Now, researchers have uncovered the molecular pathway that explains how exercise helps us maintain muscle.

The study, published in PNAS, found that exercise suppresses a transcription factor, DEAF1, that drives protein imbalance and muscle decline, helping muscles to regenerate.

“We believe our findings are important because they uncover a previously unknown biological mechanism that helps explain why muscles weaken with age. While it has long been known that exercise protects muscle health, the molecular reasons behind this benefit were not fully understood. Our study identifies DEAF1 as a key driver of age-related muscle decline and shows that exercise can directly suppress this pathway.”

— Tang Hong-Wen, Corresponding Author, Assistant Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.

Sebnem Unluisler, genetic engineer at the London Regenerative Institute, who wasn’t involved in the study, called the study highly significant, telling Medical News Today:

“It shows that aging shifts muscle protein regulation away from repair toward accumulation, which is a core driver of muscle decline. The transcription factor DEAF1 increases with age and suppresses the cell’s ability to clear damaged proteins, leaving muscle tissue less resilient and more fragile.”