Fitness in a pill?

Widely reported the other day:

Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that they had found two drugs that did wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice’s endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment.

A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

The wording in this excerpt is a bit misleading, as the drugs had already been developed for other applications. I have seen reference to at least one study that suggests that GW1516 may increase the risk of intestinal cancer. In any event, the researchers were clearly well aware of the possibility of abuse:

With money from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Dr. Evans has devised a test to detect whether an athlete has taken the drugs and has made it available to the World Anti-Doping Agency, which prepares a list of forbidden substances for the International Olympic Committee. Officials at the anti-doping agency confirmed that they were collaborating with Dr. Evans on a test but could not say when they would start using it.

The article doesn't state whether the test has been patented, and if so, who will profit from it.

Although the notion of building muscular endurance through medication sound great, there are still some big questions here. First, how dramatic is a 44% or even 75% endurance increase in four weeks when starting out from a low baseline? If you're talking about a real coach potato, four weeks of daily runs of steadily increasing length should yield something more like a doubling of endurance, no drugs required. Then there's the question of how much else is going on beyond increased muscular endurance. Are there going to be cardiovascular benefits in any way comparable to those provided by normal exercise? Finally, what happens when very fit mice are given these drugs?

Posted by David on August 2, 2008 10:14 PM