A new experimental model designed at the Wayne State University School of Medicine mimicking a sedentary lifestyle in humans shows that lack of movement leads to weaker muscles, slower movement and shorter lifespans, offering a simple way to study the health risks of sedentary lifestyles and test potential treatments.
The good news, said principal investigator and Assistant Professor of Pharmacology Alyson Sujkowski, Ph.D., ’22, is the experiments also showed that even short exercise programs dramatically improved lifelong health.
“A new Drosophila model of prolonged inactivity shortens lifespan and impairs muscle function,” is published in Scientific Reports.
Drosophila are more commonly known as fruit flies. Her laboratory developed a fruit fly model in which the flies were kept in tiny spaces, limiting mobility.
“Just like in people and other animals, the sedentary flies had weaker muscles, moved more slowly, and lived shorter lives than normal flies,” Dr. Sujkowski said. “Giving inactive flies short breaks for exercise or boosting certain exercise-related genes protected their muscles and prolonged their lifespan.”
The Sujkowski lab studies how exercise can shorten the lifespan-healthspan gap.
“We know that exercise improves our healthspan—the high-quality period of life free from dysfunction and disease—but we’re not sure if it can also increase our life expectancy. Right now, we’re particularly interested in how individualized exercise programs can simultaneously improve our healthspan and extend our lifespan, and I think even more excitingly, whether these beneficial effects can be inherited,” she said. “This study is an important piece of that puzzle. Our habits, whether healthy or unhealthy, have a major impact on future generations. Fruit flies are an excellent model for studying how this happens at the genetic level because we can observe multiple generations in the fraction of the time it would take with other animals or humans.”
Inactive flies dramatically improved their long-term health after short exercise breaks, despite the exercise program only lasting three weeks of their life.
“The finding underscores what a powerful protective intervention exercise really is. Even though the flies were inactive for the majority of their lives, exercising for just a portion of that time made them substantially healthier,” she said.
The research team will move on to more detailed studies to uncover the biological mechanisms that make inactivity harmful to humans.
“Since at least 60% of human genes and about 75% of human disease-related genes have close counterparts in flies, this model provides a powerful tool. Our goal is to use it to understand not only why inactivity reduces quality of life, but also how we might prevent these effects in aging or disabled individuals who cannot engage in regular exercise,” Dr. Sujkowski said.