Community turnout lifts IHMC clinical trial to a great start

Dr. Marcas Bamman likes to think of exercise as a miracle drug.

“I’ve long believed that we need to leverage exercise as a true form of medicine,” says Bamman, a Senior Research Scientist at IHMC and Director of the Institute’s lab for Healthspan, Resilience and Performance Research. “If we could bottle exercise into a pill, it would be a miracle drug.”

Right now, with Pensacola’s help, Bamman and his colleagues at IHMC are in the midst of a clinical trial designed to demonstrate exercise’s potential to slow down and even reverse the hallmarks of aging.  Called Multidimensional Modeling to Maximize Adaptations to Exercise (M³AX), the clinical trial aims to provide evidence of exercise’s ability to improve the healthspan and quality of life of people ages 60 and older.

Over a 30-year career, Bamman has been involved in healthspan studies and clinical trials around the world.  He has worked to provide physicians and health-care providers with the evidence they need to leverage exercise as medicine.  The M³AX trial that’s underway is a good example and it’s off to a great start thanks to the turnout and interest of Pensacola and the surrounding communities.

“Our clinical trials are typically pretty demanding for the volunteers but the intent is for them to also be highly rewarding.  Recruiting volunteers for clinical trials like M³AX is often challenging, but thankfully not in this community. The turnout of people in Pensacola wanting to participate has been phenomenal,” says Bamman, who is the principal investigator of M³AX.

The Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City and the University of Florida are collaborating on the clinical trial that’s being funded by the National Institutes of Health. The recruitment goals are to enroll 156 people in Pensacola and 94 people in Oklahoma City. The goal is to run 250 people over 60 years old through the 23-week exercise regimen, which includes three days a week of combined endurance training and weight training.

It’s not just the people of Pensacola who have been great, but also the health-care systems, says Bamman. “Baptist and Ascension Sacred Heart and HCA Florida West have been more than willing to collaborate with us. So if we find something abnormal during a screening exam, we have the partners for referrals. If they have a heart condition or a bone or joint condition, we can send them to somebody. That’s been a great service for the people participating in the trial.”

The study has attracted volunteers from all walks of life and professional backgrounds, says Bamman. “We have physicians, nurses, artists, architects and pilots. We’ve had Navy veterans and Air Force veterans and a number of other people who served in the military. We’ve even had a few husband-and-wife couples sign up.”

The oldest participant so far has been 87. But the most remarkable thing about the community’s turnout is that more than half of the clinical trial’s participants are 70 and older.

“We have a very stringent set of screening criteria,” says Bamman. “When we designed the trial for people 60 and older, we told the NIH a minimum of 30 percent of the participants would be 70 or older, which is an age group more challenging to enroll. That’s because the older you get, the more chance there is that something screens you out. But rather than struggling to get 70+ year-olds, we have had great success thanks to Pensacola.”

Bamman believes there are two main reasons why Pensacola and the surrounding area have shown so much interest in the trial. “First, what we’re doing promotes healthspan and people in this age group are especially interested in taking better care of themselves. That’s the first thing.”

The second thing, says Bamman, is that the clinical trial is the first opportunity for people in Northwest Florida to participate in an NIH funded study like this. “A lot of the participants will come up to me and say, ‘This is unbelievable. I can’t believe we’re doing something like this here, that we have a facility like this in Pensacola.’”

Indeed, the $40 million healthspan, resilience and performance research complex opened two years ago. It was specifically designed to be able to conduct clinical trials and studies like the NIH-funded M³AX trial. Bamman says it has been very encouraging for him to see how the people in the trial see the value of the complex and what IHMC is doing for them and Pensacola.

He tells the story of one participant who had just started the program who asked how much it would cost him if he were having to pay for all the personal trainers who are working with him as well all the diagnostic tests that are being done him.

“It would be really expensive, wouldn’t it?” said the gentleman.

“Well, since you’re a taxpayer,” said Bamman, “you’ve already paid for it. This is government money supporting the trial. We just happened to bring that taxpayer money back here to Pensacola so we could do cool stuff like the study you’re in.”