VA Health Coverage and Muscle Health

Agents with VA health coverage through USA-Online-Health-Insurance.com work hard to stay on top of new medications and treatments that may be brought into play when treating their clients. The teams of actuaries who work for the different health insurance companies are tasked with projecting future costs of medical care, as well as future claims that may be processed by the company.

These projections affect the insurance companies' investment capital as well as premiums for VA health coverage. As new therapies and drugs are developed, consumer health can improve, but it is usually at a price. The new techniques, machines, and drugs can be very expensive. In this case, stem cell research is at the fore. As with so many aspects of these studies, stem cells seem to hold the key to all kinds of new medical treatments that have heretofore been unavailable.

It is no different with muscle health. According to Medical News Today, stem cells present in adult muscles actually respond to exercise. The studies were made available to VA health coverage from the University of Illinois. It appears that the mesenchymal stem cells or MSCs that reside in muscles are important for muscle repair in incidents in which there is damage from chemical injections. In these cases, muscle tissue becomes damaged and inflamed because of medically necessary injections, or for other reasons. Dr. Marni Boppart, in dealing with the studies in which MSC treatment repaired these damaged muscle tissues, began to wonder if the MSC would also respond to the stress of exercise.

Dr. Boppart surmised that, since exercise technically does injury to muscles in that they are "remodeling" the muscle, perhaps exercise would also trigger MSC accumulation. She was curious as to whether or not the MSCs were part of the process of building muscles that seems to occur after the person has exercised.  If so, it may be possible to manipulate these stem cells into rebuilding muscles through physical therapies. Of course, VA health coverage knows that exercise builds muscle, but to incorporate stem cell therapies into rebuilding damaged muscles, or in preventing muscle loss and atrophy in people as they age, MSC therapy could be invaluable.

In the studies Dr. Boppart conducted, VA health coverage says that they discovered that MSCs do, indeed, respond very quickly to exercise. While the MSCs do not, themselves, cause accelerated growth of muscle fibers, they do release a growth factor. This growth factor is the catalyst that causes other muscle cells to fuse, generating new muscle fibers. This is the basis upon which muscles are strengthened after exercising.

It also appears that MSCs decrease as the person ages. This may be the main contributor to the decline of muscle mass. The hypothesis is that, as MSCs are produced by exercising muscles, they are spread through the circulatory system, benefitting the whole body. If the MSCs can be harnessed and reproduced, they may not only benefit muscles, but other systems in the body. VA health coverage will continue to follow this interesting research.