Potential of probiotics in improving sarcopenic muscle targeting ‘Gut-Muscle Axis’ through gut microbiota : A solution for healthy aging.

Abstract

Sarcopenia is a geriatric condition of a skeletal muscle with its major hallmarks of myofiber atrophy, hypoplasia, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction and insulin insensitivity resulting in poor locomotor ability. Gut microbiota improves the sarcopenic muscle condition in different ways and the “Gut-muscle axis” has an important role to play in muscle health. Akt1, mTOR, and FoxO signal pathways check imbalance in the levels of signal molecules like IGF-1, insulin, etc. Microbial metabolites like SCFA released by gut microbiota modulate age-related changes through these signal pathways. The optimal concentration of gut microbiota composition impacts protein synthesis in the muscle and reduces inflammation. The present review focuses on the promising potential of probiotics in tackling sarcopenia by replenishing and modulating aging gut microbiota and enhancing their functionality thus moderating muscle atrophy. As most of the work is reported on animal models, it is suggested that well-controlled human intervention studies using advanced techniques of metagenomic and metatranscriptomic will throw more light on interactions between probiotics and gut microbiota in sarcopenic conditions which can be corroborated by the biochemical and histochemical analysis of muscle. Probiotics derived from the gut microbiota or customized Next Generation Probiotics (NGP) may be considered a more novel and fruitful strategy to address sarcopenia for healthy aging in the future.