Start Now: Maintaining Muscle Mass for Your Later Years

In Abbott’s nutrition business, we spend our days researching what nutritional needs people have at all stages of life and developing products needed to support these evolving needs. It’s an important mission for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that people in much of the world are living longer than ever.

In the U.S., for example, the number of people age 65 or older has grown ten-fold over the last century. We can manage chronic diseases, like heart disease and diabetes, more effectively than we could just 30 or 40 years ago. As medical care has improved, so has quality of life. And the scientific community and our own researchers at Abbott continue to work to better understand what kinds of nutrition people need earlier in their lives that can make their later years healthier and more active.

It’s amazing, really.

But with progress comes challenges. One of those is to take care of what powers the body – our muscles.  Starting at age 40, adults can lose up to 8 percent of their muscle mass every decade. Losing muscle means that things we may take for granted and enjoy every day can get more challenging due to less strength, functional decline, and even a loss of independence for older adults.

What should we do? Start addressing it now.

During the holidays, we should talk with our loved ones about getting the right nutrition and exercise to support and maintain healthy muscle mass. And be proactive with discussing this with our doctors. Recent research that Abbott supported showed a strong link between muscle mass and overall health. The authors of the research even suggest that, indeed, we should consider muscle mass as a vital sign that medical professionals should monitor.

It’s never too late to live the life we imagine for ourselves and taking care of our muscles today can have a long-lasting impact for years to come.