Roughly 50% of a human’s body weight is made of muscles which are a kind of elastic tissue around the skeleton. It helps the body to move around and to do so they contract. Muscle wasting is a loss of muscle mass due to the muscles weakening and shrinking. Therefore lack of physical activities for an extended period of time will cause the muscle tissues to be waste, according to a research, muscle wasting can develop within 10 days in healthy senior adults on bed rest, 40% decrease in muscle strength may occur within the first week. However there are also many other reasons that cause muscle atrophy for example:
1. Aging – The is also known as Sarcopenia. A study in 2013 have showed that once a person has passed the age of 50 there is a significant change to their body muscle mass. Senior adults loose up to 2% of muscle mass in a year typically. There is a reduction in response from nerve cells sending sgnals to the muscles to start the movement. The decrease in ability to turn protein into energy or on the opposite not consuming enough calories or protein each day to sustain muscle mass.
2. Malnutrition – people with this symptom does not intake the necessary nutrition a body needs for rebuild causing them to have muscle loss and leading to muscle wasting. However there are several causes to Malnutrition including anorexia nervosa, cancer and persistent nausea.
3. Spinal muscular atrophy – This is a genetic disease that affects the central nervous system, peripheral nervous system and voluntary muscle system. The spinal cord is a very sensitive area of the body. It controls most of the nerve cells that controls muscles. SMA is a muscular as its first affect is on muscles as they do not receive the signals from the nerve cells. Atrophy is a medical term for getting smaller which is what happens due to this medical condition.
