(New Scientist) – A number of drugs designed to prevent muscle loss and boost muscle growth are being tested in clinical trials. Columnist Michael Le Page looks at whether building and maintaining muscles is about to get a whole lot easier

Building muscle is hard. Stop working out for just a few days and you start to lose it. What’s more, it gets tougher and tougher just to maintain muscle as we get older. But now a number of muscle-boosting drugs are being tested in clinical trials. Is staying strong into old age about to get much easier?

The origin of this kind of muscle-boosting drug dates back to the 1990s, when a team in the US discovered a protein resembling known growth factors, which boost or hinder cell growth. (Read More)