Remember when you were younger and you sat around watching television a lot, and your mother chastised you: “Move around a bit, you’re wasting away!” As it turns out, she wasn’t just exaggerating; your muscles can atrophy, or shrink, when not used. This is a significant problem because not only do you lose your manly six-pack when this happens, but you can also develop significant health problems, like an increased risk for other injuries and have difficulty moving, as seen in many cases.
Image Source: Caiaimage/Tom Merton
How does it happen?
Biologically, muscle atrophy occurs when your body begins to break down proteins in your muscle when you don’t use them, resulting in muscle shrinkage. Your body decides that if you’re not using the protein in your muscles, why not use the protein for energy instead?
In unfortunate cases, you may get a disease (e.g. cancer, acquired immune deficiency syndrome) or an injury that will prevent you from using the muscle, leading to muscle loss. Furthermore, if you’re not eating enough, your body will break down muscles to get that needed energy.
In the most unfortunate case, if you damage the nerve controlling a muscle, you also can’t move that muscle. Hence, you get muscle loss. Note that this can’t be treated conventionally like the other causes of muscle loss.
How do you cure or fix it?
Since muscular atrophy is fundamentally just shrinking of muscle, treatments that increase muscle size will help cure muscular atrophy. In this case, exercise can help treat muscular atrophy, because it not only helps build muscle mass, but it also tells the body to make more proteins instead of breaking them down.
So, you may be thinking: “Wait, I read an interesting article written by an amazing author on steroids. Don’t steroids make muscles bigger too? Why not use them as a cure?” While steroids are used in cases of severe muscular atrophy, they do carry side effects. Furthermore, steroid usage still requires exercise in order to work properly. If the muscle in question is unused due to injury, steroid treatment is more or less useless.
Another potential treatment is electroshock therapy. The treatment can be especially useful when combined with other drugs because it can activate nerves after they have degenerated. Nerve degeneration is a significant problem in patients with severe muscular atrophy because they don’t use their muscles for a long time.
If you don’t use your muscles for whatever reason (sickness, injury, laziness), your body is going to start breaking down your muscles for energy. You’re going to either have to eventually move around in order to get your body to stop eating your muscles, or you’re going to have to resort to painful treatments like electroshock therapy or steroids. Now, go out and get some exercise!
