First time poster, been lurking for a while! I really enjoy the content that BBM has been putting out, so thanks!
Any thoughts would be welcome, I understand that medical advice can be a touchy issue!
I know a 70 year old male who claims that his post polio muscle atrophy is preventing him from being able to exercise or strength train due to the risk of damaging existing motor unit neurons.
It seems his underlying idea is that one of his legs is at an extremely high risk of losing function due to it operating with a significantly reduced number of motor neurons and that training to increase muscle mass would result in the overworking and loss of the existing motor unit neurons.
A quick search seems to show that these claims are not proven in scientific literature. One of the questions that comes to mind is whether “exercise” or strength training have been shown to have positive outcomes in a similar scenario.
Post-polio syndrome is characterized by fatigue, new-onset weakness, and several other symptoms in a patient who has recovered from prior paralytic polio. There is thinking that “excessive” or highly fatiguing exercise may increase the risk of PPS (possibly related to overwhelming the compensatory motor unit expansion due to collateral re-innervation), however it is not true that these patients must avoid exercise. Based on the current evidence, lower intensity strength training has benefit for this population, see:
This is excellent information, thank you sir! As a bonus, this got me trying out the advanced search feature on PubMed.
Barbell Medicine is really doing great things for the community. Cheers!