Research

Mixed

Five days of bed rest does not significantly alter skeletal muscle mitochondrial protein content, enzyme activity, or dynamics (fission/fusion/biogenesis/mitophagy markers) in healthy older adults.

For older adults facing short hospital stays (around 5 days), do not panic about losing metabolic health or mitochondrial density. While muscle mass may decrease, the cellular machinery for energy production remains largely intact during this specific timeframe, suggesting that immediate post-discharge recovery of metabolic function is feasible without needing to rebuild mitochondrial content from scratch.

GoodRefutesHIGH confidence
a clinically relevant, 5-day period of BR resulted in no significant perturbation in muscle mitochondrial protein signaling in healthy older adults, with no effect of ST-REP in the week prior to BR.
Ryan N. Marshall et al. · Physiological Reports · 2022

Why this rating

Randomized controlled trial design with objective biochemical markers, though small sample size (n=10).

Source

No effect of five days of bed rest or short‐term resistance exercise prehabilitation on markers of skeletal muscle mitochondrial content and dynamics in older adults

Ryan N. Marshall et al. · Physiological Reports · 2022

DOI 10.14814/phy2.15345

rct · n=10Cited 17×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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