Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Canada's population is rapidly aging with the percentage of those >65 years old projected to double in the next 20 years and with those >85 years old being expected to triple. Aging is associated with a significant loss of muscle mass and strength (termed sarcopenia) leading to frailty and can be regarded as the transition state from healthy to being disabled. Frailty results in a greater risk for falls, hospitalization, and institutionalization, resulting in substantial healthcare costs. Clearly our rapidly increasing aging population will contribute to staggering healthcare costs. Furthermore, lack of research in this field and little practice of prevention of disability will compound this problem. Muscle protein synthesis (MPS) is generally shown to be negatively affected by aging. The only amino acid that increases MPS on its own is leucine. While leucine can abruptly recover MPS levels in the elderly, long-term supplementation has returned conflicting results. Resistance training (RT) combined with supplements has been shown to have increased benefits over placebo in healthy older adults, however, the cellular and molecular mechanisms of how this happens is unknown. Our objective is to test the effect of added leucine to a 12-week intervention of RT and adequate protein intake on muscle mass and physical performance, and to provide mechanistic understanding of its effect. We hypothesize that the addition of leucine to an adequate daily protein intake with RT will be superior to the combination of protein and RT alone in improving MPS, muscle mass, and physical performance in frail/prefrail elderly women (n=24). To our knowledge, no data exists on frail elderly women regarding how they may benefit from RT combined with leucine supplementation. This is the population that would benefit the most from such an intervention by preventing disability and its overwhelming healthcare costs and permitting maintenance of autonomy and quality of life.