Scientist Create Pill to Mimic Effects of Exercise

The goal, researches say, is to help the elderly or others who have trouble exercising, such as people suffering obesity, type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, Quartz.com reports. The study concludes that it is unrealistic to expect that all of the benefits of exercise like improved cognitive function, increased bone strength, or improved cardiac function will be possible with any exercise pill presently in development.

Pills that mimic the benefits of exercise without any of the hard work could soon be available, scientists believe.

The researchers analyzed human skeletal muscle biopsies from four untrained, healthy males following 10 minutes of high intensity exercise.

Research at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre has identified a thousand molecular changes in muscles during exercise, providing the world’s first comprehensive exercise blueprint.

Most traditional drugs target individual molecules.

Now that they have a better idea of what exactly goes down in our body when we exercise, scientists are considering developing drugs that mimic the effects of physical activity.

(Steve Parsons/PA) “Exercise produces an extremely complex, cascading set of responses within human muscle”.

“It is widely acknowledged that exercise induces a number of physiological adaptations that have beneficial effects in the prevention and treatment of these chronic metabolic diseases”. It plays an essential role in controlling energy metabolism and insulin sensitivity. “It’s always been thought that there were many signals elicited by exercise, but we were the first to create this map and we now know the complexity”.

With this long-term goal in mind, researchers narrowed down the therapeutic possibilities within the blueprint using mathematical and engineering-based analysis. The new exercise blueprint the scientists created shows that an exercise drug will need to target multiple molecules and even pathways in the body.

Numerous molecular changes they discovered had not been linked to exercise. They exposed 1,000 molecular changes that occur in our muscles when we exercise, opening the door for drug treatments to mirror the health benefits of exercise.