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An Indian-origin scientist and his team have now figured out Exercise is a well-known stimulus for new bone formation. The paper was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Dr Mone Zaidi from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and researchers from Universities of Ancona and Bari in Italy discovered that a newly-found molecule produced by skeletal muscle in response to exercise has been shown to increase bone mass. Dr Zaidi graduated from the King George's Medical College (KGMC) in Lucknow in 1983.
"It establishes for the first time a molecule released from muscle during exercise can act directly on long bones to increase their strength. These are the bones utilized during exercise and also the ones most likely to break," explained Zaidi, professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
In the experiment, young male mice were injected with irisin, a recently identified signaling protein molecule. In the injected mice, researchers observed significant increases in bone mass and strength, specifically cortical bone, which is a dense and compact type of bone tissue that constitutes about 80 percent of skeletal weight. The study suggests irisin is fundamental to muscle-bone communication and likely translates the well-known skeletal anabolic action of exercise by directly stimulating new bone synthesis by osteoblasts.
"Identifying irisin could lead to the development of future therapies for sarcopenia, the gradual loss of muscle mass seen as one gets older, and osteoporosis," the authors emphasized.
"Understanding this molecular connection between muscle and bone gives us hope for treating age-related bone and muscle loss at the same time, with the same agent," Dr Zaidi pointed out.
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