Latest news with #BirminghamUniversity
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Is it true that … it's harder to build muscle mass and strength as you age?
'Your muscles become less responsive to exercise with age,' says Professor Leigh Breen, an expert in skeletal muscle physiology and metabolism at Birmingham University. 'It's not as easy to gain muscle and strength as when you were younger.' But that doesn't mean it's not worth the effort. 'The idea that exercise becomes pointless past a certain age is simply wrong,' he says. 'Everyone responds to structured exercise. You may not build as much visible muscle, but strength, cardiovascular health, brain function and protection against non-transmittable disease all improve.' Muscle mass and strength begin to decline from about the age of 40, compared with peak levels in your 20s. It's thought the body's responsiveness to training also starts to wane around then, but it is still possible to build muscle with the right strategy. 'With a few tweaks – more frequent sessions or increasing the number of sets in each workout – older adults can achieve results close to those of younger people,' Breen says. 'Nutrition is also key. Adequate protein, plus carbs and healthy fats, fuel your exercise, accelerate your recovery and support how your body adapts.' UK guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week for those aged 19 to 64, plus muscle-strengthening exercises, such as lifting weights, for all major muscle groups at least twice a week. This is vital not just for fitness, but for long-term health. 'Regular aerobic and resistance training cuts the risk of almost every noncommunicable disease – type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's,' Breen says. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Can exercising still have a positive impact on your health, even if you've never picked up a weight? 'Definitely,' he says. 'People who've trained for years are better protected, but even late starters can dramatically reduce their disease risk in a short time.'
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Is it true that … it's harder to build muscle mass and strength as you age?
'Your muscles become less responsive to exercise with age,' says Professor Leigh Breen, an expert in skeletal muscle physiology and metabolism at Birmingham University. 'It's not as easy to gain muscle and strength as when you were younger.' But that doesn't mean it's not worth the effort. 'The idea that exercise becomes pointless past a certain age is simply wrong,' he says. 'Everyone responds to structured exercise. You may not build as much visible muscle, but strength, cardiovascular health, brain function and protection against non-transmittable disease all improve.' Muscle mass and strength begin to decline from about the age of 40, compared with peak levels in your 20s. It's thought the body's responsiveness to training also starts to wane around then, but it is still possible to build muscle with the right strategy. 'With a few tweaks – more frequent sessions or increasing the number of sets in each workout – older adults can achieve results close to those of younger people,' Breen says. 'Nutrition is also key. Adequate protein, plus carbs and healthy fats, fuel your exercise, accelerate your recovery and support how your body adapts.' UK guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week for those aged 19 to 64, plus muscle-strengthening exercises, such as lifting weights, for all major muscle groups at least twice a week. This is vital not just for fitness, but for long-term health. 'Regular aerobic and resistance training cuts the risk of almost every noncommunicable disease – type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's,' Breen says. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Can exercising still have a positive impact on your health, even if you've never picked up a weight? 'Definitely,' he says. 'People who've trained for years are better protected, but even late starters can dramatically reduce their disease risk in a short time.'
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
In some UK woodlands, every young tree has died. What's going wrong?
To the untrained eye, Monks Wood looks healthy and lush in the summer sun. Hundreds of butterflies dance on the edge of footpaths in the ancient Cambridgeshire woodland, which is rich with ash, maple and oak trees. Birds flit through the hedgerows as they feed. A fox ambles through a forest clearing, before disappearing into long grass. But for a number of years, it has been clear to Bruno Ladvocat and Rachel Mailes that something is missing. In 2022, Ladvocat, Mailes and their research team from Birmingham University were out sampling when they noticed that the small trees that typically cover the woodland floor were increasingly hard to find. Today, in the dappled sunshine surrounding the largest trees, spaces that would normally be home to a mass of saplings scrambling for light are bare. This pattern is not limited to the 157-hectare (388-acre) site. From Buckholt Wood in Monmouthshire to Glen Tanar in the Cairngorms, new research across eight sites around the UK shows evidence of a deeply concerning trend: ancient woodlands are failing to regenerate. Despite having vastly different species, soil types, rainfall and temperatures throughout the year, all the sites were following the same trend: the saplings were dying. Mailes, a postgraduate researcher and co-author of the research, says: 'We could see as we were going through the forest that there wasn't a lot of regeneration coming back up. I had the sad job of crossing off all the saplings that we couldn't find or that we were finding dead. 'Across a lot of different species, they were just not coming back. It really made us think: there's a problem here. Then we ran all the data and we could see that we were right,' she says. The study, which has not yet completed the peer-review process, found that sapling mortality rate increased by 90%,from 16.2% of saplings a year on average dying before 2000, increasing to 30.8% in 2022. This means that an average sapling's chance of survival after five years has fallen from 41.3% to just 15.8%. There was also a 46% drop in the number of small trees becoming established over the same period. At two sites – Denny Wood in the New Forest and Dendles Wood on Dartmoor – no saplings at all have survived since 1995 in the sites studied. The research is based on rare long-term monitoring of the same areas of ancient woodland since 1959, which allowed researchers to monitor changes over six decades. Its findings have sparked concern about the future resilience of Britain's forests. Global heating, disease and overgrazing by deer could all be causing the loss. Drought and extreme heat have become commonplace in many forests. In addition, the rate of biomass loss has started to increase across the study sites, with a rise in mortality rates of the largest trees observed in some areas, rising from 0.5% to 0.8% a year. This means that one in every 125 of the largest trees die every year instead of one in every 200. As a result, the rate at which the woodlands are removing carbon from the atmosphere has started to fall. 'I look at this as a big worry,' says Ladvocat. 'Even in areas which are relatively open, where you would expect to see new trees coming up and more trees surviving, we see less coming up and more dying. 'These forests are in a moment that makes them more vulnerable to the challenges they are facing, such as climate change and new pathogens. If there's an external force that starts killing a lot of big trees around them, then there might not be enough saplings and small trees to replace them,' he says. Deeper into Monks Wood, we stumble across a clearing that highlights one of the many pressures in ancient woodlands: a group of ash trees, a skeletal grey, all killed off by ash dieback, a fungal disease. There is no green in the canopy, just a straight view of the blue sky above. The disease is projected to kill up to 80% of the UK's ash trees in the coming years, and the problem is so bad in Monks Wood that researchers have to wear helmets when leaving the path to protect them from falling branches. On closer inspection, many other ash trees in the woodland are suffering from the disease. Concerns about forests' ability to regenerate in a warming world are not new, but data is sparse and the subject is understudied, the researchers say. 'The conditions of these forests are not unlike those of other forest remnants across Great Britain and much of Europe. That's why it's concerning,' says Ladvocat. 'These changes may be more widespread than what we were able to detect with our current dataset.' Ladvocat and Mailes are part of Membra, a project based at Birmingham University aiming to better understand how trees retain and pass on memories of stress and how this knowledge can improve resilience and management. The researchers are looking for ways to help UK woodlands reverse this worrying trend as temperatures continue to rise, bringing yet more stress. Researchers hope they can develop methods to trigger genetic markers in seeds that make them more likely to survive. In theory, they could lead to the development of a 'bootcamp' for seedlings that could help improve forest resilience. 'There is still hope for these forests,' Ladvocat insists. 'They are still absorbing carbon; they still have lots of species that are connected to people's history. There is a possibility that this can be reversed, possibly with the help of people.' Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Why are some of Britain's ancient woodlands failing to regenerate?
To the untrained eye, Monks Wood looks healthy and lush in the summer sun. Hundreds of butterflies dance on the edge of footpaths in the ancient Cambridgeshire woodland, which is rich with ash, maple and oak trees. Birds flit through the hedgerows as they feed. A fox ambles through a forest clearing, before disappearing into long grass. But for a number of years, it has been clear to Bruno Ladvocat and Rachel Mailes that something is missing. In 2022, Ladvocat, Mailes and their research team from Birmingham University were out sampling when they noticed that the small trees that typically cover the woodland floor were increasingly hard to find. Today, in the dappled sunshine surrounding the largest trees, spaces that would normally be home to a mass of saplings scrambling for light are bare. This pattern is not limited to the 157-hectare (388-acre) site. From Buckholt Wood in Monmouthshire to Glen Tanar in the Cairngorms, new research across eight sites around the UK shows evidence of a deeply concerning trend: ancient woodlands are failing to regenerate. Despite having vastly different species, soil types, rainfall and temperatures throughout the year, all the sites were following the same trend: the saplings were dying. Mailes, a postgraduate researcher and co-author of the research, says: 'We could see as we were going through the forest that there wasn't a lot of regeneration coming back up. I had the sad job of crossing off all the saplings that we couldn't find or that we were finding dead. 'Across a lot of different species, they were just not coming back. It really made us think: there's a problem here. Then we ran all the data and we could see that we were right,' she says. The study, which has not yet completed the peer-review process, found that sapling mortality rate increased by 90%,from 16.2% of saplings a year on average dying before 2000, increasing to 30.8% in 2022. This means that an average sapling's chance of survival after five years has fallen from 41.3% to just 15.8%. There was also a 46% drop in the number of small trees becoming established over the same period. At two sites – Denny Wood in the New Forest and Dendles Wood on Dartmoor – no saplings at all have survived since 1995 in the sites studied. The research is based on rare long-term monitoring of the same areas of ancient woodland since 1959, which allowed researchers to monitor changes over six decades. Its findings have sparked concern about the future resilience of Britain's forests. Global heating, disease and overgrazing by deer could all be causing the loss. Drought and extreme heat have become commonplace in many forests. In addition, the rate of biomass loss has started to increase across the study sites, with a rise in mortality rates of the largest trees observed in some areas, rising from 0.5% to 0.8% a year. This means that one in every 125 of the largest trees die every year instead of one in every 200. As a result, the rate at which the woodlands are removing carbon from the atmosphere has started to fall. 'I look at this as a big worry,' says Ladvocat. 'Even in areas which are relatively open, where you would expect to see new trees coming up and more trees surviving, we see less coming up and more dying. 'These forests are in a moment that makes them more vulnerable to the challenges they are facing, such as climate change and new pathogens. If there's an external force that starts killing a lot of big trees around them, then there might not be enough saplings and small trees to replace them,' he says. Deeper into Monks Wood, we stumble across a clearing that highlights one of the many pressures in ancient woodlands: a group of ash trees, a skeletal grey, all killed off by ash dieback, a fungal disease. There is no green in the canopy, just a straight view of the blue sky above. The disease is projected to kill up to 80% of the UK's ash trees in the coming years, and the problem is so bad in Monks Wood that researchers have to wear helmets when leaving the path to protect them from falling branches. On closer inspection, many other ash trees in the woodland are suffering from the disease. Concerns about forests' ability to regenerate in a warming world are not new, but data is sparse and the subject is understudied, the researchers say. 'The conditions of these forests are not unlike those of other forest remnants across Great Britain and much of Europe. That's why it's concerning,' says Ladvocat. 'These changes may be more widespread than what we were able to detect with our current dataset.' Ladvocat and Mailes are part of Membra, a project based at Birmingham University aiming to better understand how trees retain and pass on memories of stress and how this knowledge can improve resilience and management. The researchers are looking for ways to help UK woodlands reverse this worrying trend as temperatures continue to rise, bringing yet more stress. Researchers hope they can develop methods to trigger genetic markers in seeds that make them more likely to survive. In theory, they could lead to the development of a 'bootcamp' for seedlings that could help improve forest resilience. 'There is still hope for these forests,' Ladvocat insists. 'They are still absorbing carbon; they still have lots of species that are connected to people's history. There is a possibility that this can be reversed, possibly with the help of people.' Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage
Yahoo
10-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Turtles could hold key to curing cancer
Turtles could hold the key to finding a cure for cancer, researchers have found. Creatures that are both large and long-lived typically face a higher risk of getting the disease, but turtles seem to defy that pattern. The reason may lie in their strong defence against cell damage, slow metabolism, which reduces cellular stress, and unique genes that protect against cancer, researchers said. In the study, scientists from the universities of Nottingham and Birmingham analysed medical records of autopsies from hundreds of zoo turtles, including some from Chester Zoo in Cheshire. They found that 1 per cent had been affected by cancer, far less than in mammals or birds. It also discovered that, when tumours did appear, they almost never spread. Some turtle species – which included tortoises – have life spans beyond 100. The Galapagos and Aldabra giant tortoises, for example, have lived beyond 150. In April, a female of the species became a first-time mother at the age of 100 in Philadelphia Zoo. Credit: Philadelphia Zoo Digital The researchers said the findings highlighted how essential it was to protect endangered species. Dr Ylenia Chiari, one of the authors of the study from the school of life sciences at the University of Nottingham, said: 'Turtles, especially iconic species like Galapagos and Aldabra giant tortoises, are famous for living long lives and growing to tremendous sizes. 'You'd expect that to mean more cancer, but our study, which combines decades of zoo records with previous research, shows how incredibly rare cancer is in these animals. 'It highlights turtles as an untapped model for understanding cancer resistance and healthy ageing, and it shows the vital role zoos play in advancing science through collaboration.' Dr Scott Glaberman, from the University of Birmingham, added: 'Biodiversity has so much to teach us about how the world works. 'While fascinating in their own right, extreme species like giant tortoises may have already solved many of the problems humans face, including those related to ageing and cancer. That makes biodiversity doubly worthy of protection.' Dr Helena Turner, the research officer at Chester Zoo, said: 'It's fantastic to see these efforts not only contribute to advancing scientific knowledge around cancer resistance but also support vital conservation work to protect these remarkable species that may hold keys to medical breakthroughs benefiting both wildlife and humans.' The study was published in the journal BioScience. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
