Trial Report The impact of bed rest on human skeletal muscle metabolism, 2024, Wüst

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(23)00601-8#

ARTICLE| VOLUME 5, ISSUE 1, 101372, JANUARY 16, 2024
The impact of bed rest on human skeletal muscle metabolism

• Moritz Eggelbusch
• Braeden T. Charlton
• Alessandra Bosutti
• Bergita Ganse
• Ifigenia Giakoumaki
• Anita E. Grootemaat
• Paul W. Hendrickse
• Yorrick Jaspers
• Stephan Kemp
• Tom J. Kerkhoff
• Wendy Noort
• Michel van Weeghel
• Nicole N. van der Wel
• Julia R. Wesseling
• Petra Frings-Meuthen
• Jörn Rittweger
• Edwin R. Mulder
• Richard T. Jaspers
• Hans Degens
• Rob C.I. Wüst
  
  
  Highlights
  • •
    Muscle glycogen build-up in bed rest reduces insulin sensitivity and further storage
  • •
    Muscle lipid overload, lipotoxicity, and inflammation develop during bed rest
  • •
    Bed rest shifts muscle metabolism from fatty acid to glucose oxidation
  • •
    Intrinsic mitochondrial alterations occur after long-term bed rest
    
    
    
    
    
    Summary
    Insulin sensitivity and metabolic flexibility decrease in response to bed rest, but the temporal and causal adaptations in human skeletal muscle metabolism are not fully defined.
    
    Here, we use an integrative approach to assess human skeletal muscle metabolism during bed rest and provide a multi-system analysis of how skeletal muscle and the circulatory system adapt to short- and long-term bed rest (German Clinical Trials: DRKS00015677).
    
    We uncover that intracellular glycogen accumulation after short-term bed rest accompanies a rapid reduction in systemic insulin sensitivity and less GLUT4 localization at the muscle cell membrane, preventing further intracellular glycogen deposition after long-term bed rest.
    
    We provide evidence of a temporal link between the accumulation of intracellular triglycerides, lipotoxic ceramides, and sphingomyelins and an altered skeletal muscle mitochondrial structure and function after long-term bed rest.
    
    An intracellular nutrient overload therefore represents a crucial determinant for rapid skeletal muscle insulin insensitivity and mitochondrial alterations after prolonged bed rest.
    
    

 

Comment underneath which I thought was interesting. I wonder how many people with ME/CFS have been scared into “not resting too much” when more rest/less activity might be better.

 

Not sure why the poster on Twitter is saying the participants didn’t develop ME/CFS. I skimmed through the paper and I don’t see where they assessed if participants developed clinical symptoms of PEM, fatigue, cog dysfunction etc.

 

Compare with their Long Covid study —

 

Development of ME/CFS would have constituted a serious adverse event that would be required to be reported. NASA and the ESA have been doing these types of bed-rest studies for decades.

 

That’s quite a leap.

Anyway, the metabolic changes observed here are very similar to those reported in obesity studies. What they inadvertently looked at here is the effect of a hypercaloric diet.

 

This press release by their university gives some brief info:

All experiments, meals, and leisure activities took place lying down. Participants were restricted in their movements, reducing the strain on muscles.​

"The beds were inclined at an angle of 6 degrees, with the head lower than the feet to simulate the displacement of body fluids that astronauts experience in a microgravity environment. For the first time, the potential of artificial gravity was investigated (centrifugation at about 1G at the level of the navel) as a preventive measure against the adverse effects of weightlessness on the human body", says Wüst.
​

Source: After 6 days of inactivity, people develop the first symptoms of type 2 diabetes - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (vu.nl)

Could not find anything either. Suspect that people are using the info Wust shared on Twitter earlier rather than the info in this paper. I hope that they will directly compare this deconditioned group and ME or LC patients in a future paper.

 

what specific tweet or tweets were those?

 

Tweets like these:
https://twitter.com/user/status/1750412284285927425


https://twitter.com/user/status/1750110858523361346


https://twitter.com/user/status/1748661369879007360


https://twitter.com/user/status/1745258427570364823


https://twitter.com/user/status/1743330438360272965


https://twitter.com/RobWust/status/1743248934468735295

 

These suggests that they did not see PEM in their deconditioned participants and that the difference with ME/CFS was clear.

 

I wonder how many of them developed OI or POTs and if so, for how long? It's something I was told when seeing Cardiologists re: POTS or low BP. Was told being bedbound for ME was causing this.

 

It was never a reasonable hypothesis, whatever they might say. Deconditioning doesn't fluctuate, doesn't vary on the order of hours or even minutes. That's why they added the "illness beliefs" nonsense, because it's not deconditioning and they couldn't account for that but they sold their cake, ate it, and had it too because reasons.

And that's on top of how it affects people who were very active mere weeks before, or people who were recovered, resumed their activities, then crashed. And on top of how it's only a minority who ever go through extensive bed rest. And how the symptoms don't necessarily change from early onset, where some people were very active shortly before, compared to months later, when deconditioning could be argued, if there was excessive bed rest.

This is why falsification is critical in science. These quacks never used scientific reasoning, because it proved them wrong. Their arguments amounts to "people with red hair don't exist, if you don't look for them or count them" while dismissing people with red hair saying otherwise as activists, or whatever. It's the excessive level of lying and making stuff up that makes it especially hard to kill. It was always so blatantly fake and wrong.