Fwd: a workout in a pill

Drugs Offer Promise of Fitness Without Effort
New York Times - 34 minutes ago
By NICHOLAS WADE Can you enjoy the benefits of exercise without the pain of exertion? The answer may one day be yes - just take a pill that tricks the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously.
Scientists say they've found exercise in a pill Los Angeles Times
Exercise in a Pill? Maybe WebMD

• Can you enjoy the benefits of exercise without the pain of exertion? The answer may one day be yes — just take a pill that tricks the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously.
• Researchers at the Salk Institute report they have found two drugs that do wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice's endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment.
• A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance, but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.
• They should help people who are too frail to exercise and those with health problems such as diabetes that are improved with exercise, he said.
• In a report published in the Friday issue of Cell, he describes the two drugs that successfully activate the muscle-remodeling system in mice. One, GW1516, activates PPAR-delta but the mice must also have exercise training to show increased endurance. It seems that PPAR-delta switches on one set of genes, and exercise another, and both sets are needed for great endurance.
• The second drug, called Aicar, improves endurance without any training. Dr. Evans believes it both mimics the effects of exercise and activates PPAR-delta, thus being able to switch on both sets of genes needed for the endurance signal.