My wife and running

Question
Hello Nick. My wife is 42, and was a runner long ago. She'd like to take it up again to get back in shape, but she's heard that running causes premature aging in the face for middle-aged women. She's heard that running causes long-term stress on the face which quickens the aging process, that the gravitational pounding that the face takes while "pounding the pavement" causes the face to sag in time.  Is there any truth to any of this? Thank you."

Answer
'Heavy running can lead to premature aging'

November 22 2003 at 10:57am
By Douglas Carew

The Comrades and Two Oceans ultra-marathons are as South African as boerewors and pap, but scientists at the University of Cape Town believe that running ultra-marathons could lead to premature aging.

Malcolm Collins and Associate Professors Alan St Clair Gibson and Mike Lambert have been conducting research into the phenomenon at the university's department of exercise sports science medicine.

They believe that too many ultra-marathons, ultra-triathlons and long training sessions can cause premature ageing of the muscles in certain athletes.

Interviewed by the university's weekly newspaper, the Monday Paper, the scientists said certain endurance athletes suffered from a condition dubbed Specific Acquired Training Intolerance.

Initial research on the issue had been done a few years ago by Associate Professor Wayne Derman, a sports physician based at the Sports Science Institute in Newlands.

Derman found that a number of mainly ultra-distance athletes were being referred to him by doctors and specialists. The patients, aged 24 and older, were experienced competitors who complained that they were not able to train and compete at the same level anymore.

Suspicious of the sudden onset of the symptoms, Derman found that the decline could not be put down to the natural aging process.

His research was followed by work done by Gibson who completed a case study on a 24-year-old endurance athlete. It showed that the mitochondria (structures inside cells which are responsible for energy production) in the athlete's thigh muscle had an abnormal shape.

Lambert said it appeared that the runner's muscles had aged prematurely as they had a number of characteristics normally associated with the very old.

Further biopsies showed that the mitochondria in the runner's upper arm muscle were operating correctly. This enabled the researchers to conclude that only the muscles used in running were affected with abnormally shaped mitochondria.

Doctoral student Liesl Grobler confirmed the findings after comparing a number of affected athletes, mainly endurance runners and cyclists and a squash player who took long training runs, with a symptom-free control group.

Grobler found that there was a higher incidence of muscle pathology among the ailing athletes.

Collins said it was normal, under normal conditions, to suffer some degree of muscle damage during exercise as that was part of the adaptation process taking place as muscles got stronger.

But there was a thin line between damage that lead to positive adaptation and damage that did not heal.

After viewing Grobler's findings, Collins completed a study of his own. He found that some athletes could be using up their limited supply of healer, or satellite, cells which repair damaged muscle cells after exercise.

Endurance athletes were likely to exhaust their supply of these cells and with it their ability to repair muscle damage.

Lambert said if specialists could discover what made individuals vulnerable to the phenomenon they would be able to tell athletes whether they were at risk or not and also assist physicians in finding a suitable treatment for the disorder.

Collins said the research had already enabled them to provide peace of mind for affected athletes who had gone from doctor to doctor seeking an explanation without getting the correct answers.

The researchers did not know the full story yet but at least they could tell the athletes that the problem lay in their thigh muscles and not inside their heads.

Lambert said the aim of the research was not to scare people away from endurance sports. The scientists were just pointing out that there were consequences for some people who did too much exercise.