Age‐related neuromuscular changes affecting human vastus lateralis
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
KEY POINTS: Skeletal muscle size and strength decline in older age. The vastus lateralis, a large thigh muscle, undergoes extensive neuromuscular remodelling in healthy ageing, as characterized by a loss of motor neurons, enlargement of surviving motor units and instability of neuromuscular junction transmission. The loss of motor axons and changes to motor unit potential transmission precede a clinically-relevant loss of muscle mass and function. ABSTRACT: The anterior thigh muscles are particularly susceptible to muscle loss and weakness during ageing, although how this is associated with changes to neuromuscular structure and function in terms of motor unit (MU) number, size and MU potential (MUP) stability remains unclear. Intramuscular (I.M.) and surface electromyographic signals were recorded from the vastus lateralis (VL) during voluntary contractions held at 25% maximal knee extensor strength in 22 young (mean ± SD, 25.3 ± 4.8 years) and 20 physically active older men (71.4 ± 6.2 years). MUP size, firing rates, phases, turns and near fibre (NF) jiggle were determined and MU number estimates (MUNEs) were made by comparing average surface MUP with maximal electrically-evoked compound muscle action potentials. Quadriceps cross-sectional area was measured by magnetic resonance imaging. In total, 379 individual MUs were sampled in younger men and 346 in older men. Compared to the MU in younger participants, those in older participants had 8% lower firing rates and larger MUP size (+25%), as well as increased complexity, as indicated by phases (+13%), turns (+20%) and NF jiggle (+11%) (all P < 0.0005). The MUNE values (derived from the area of muscle in range of the surface-electrode) in older participants were ∼70% of those in the young (P < 0.05). Taking into consideration the 30% smaller cross-sectional area of the VL, the total number of MUs in the older muscles was between 50% and 60% lower compared to in young muscles (P < 0.0005). A large portion of the VL MU pool is lost in older men and those recruited during moderate intensity contractions were enlarged and less stable. These MU changes were evident before clinically relevant changes to muscle function were apparent; nevertheless, the changes in MU number and size are probably a prelude to future movement problems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it