Resolving Muscle Atrophy
Muscle atrophy, or disuse atrophy, is defined as a decrease in the mass of the muscle; it can be a partial or complete wasting away of muscle. When a muscle atrophies, this leads to muscle weakness, since the ability to exert force is related to mass. Muscle atrophy results from a co-morbidity of several common diseases, including cancer, AIDS, congestive heart failure, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), renal failure, and severe burns; patients who have cachexia in these disease settings have a poor prognosis. Moreover, starvation eventually leads to muscle atrophy. Disuse of the muscles will also lead to atrophy.

Potential treatment

Muscle atrophy can be opposed by the signaling pathways which induce muscle hypertrophy, or an increase in muscle size. Therefore one way in which exercise induces an increase in muscle mass is to down-regulate the pathways which have the opposite effect. One important rehabilitation tool for muscle atrophy includes the use of functional electrical stimulation to stimulate the muscles. This has seen a large amount of success in the rehabilitation of paraplegic patients. Since the absence of muscle-building amino acids can contribute to muscle wasting (that which is torn down must be rebuilt with like material), amino acid therapy may be helpful for regenerating damaged or atrophied muscle tissue. The branched-chain amino acids or BCAAs (leucine, isoleucine, and valine) are critical to this process, in addition to lysine and other amino acids.