In a new collaborative effort led by Stanford Medicine, researchers have explored the underlying mechanisms through which exercise promotes overall health, particularly brain health.
By understanding how exercise affects different organs at the molecular level, health care providers could tailor exercise recommendations more effectively.
This knowledge could also pave the way for developing drug therapies that mimic the benefits of exercise for those who are unable to engage in physical activity.
The study — whose findings appear in Nature
— involved nearly 10,000 measurements across almost 20 types of tissues to examine the impact of 8 weeks of endurance exercise in lab rats trained to run on tiny treadmills.
Its conclusion reveals remarkable effects of exercise on the immune system, stress response, energy production and metabolism.
The researchers identified significant connections between exercise and molecules and genes that are already known to be involved in numerous human diseases and tissue recovery.
Other recent papers by Stanford Medicine researchers include a report in Nature Communications
that explores exercise-induced changes in genes and tissues associated with disease risk, and a paper published in Cell Metabolism
, which examines the effects of exercise on mitochondria, the cellular energy producers, in various tissues, in rats.
How endurance training affects the body
The Nature study examined the effects of 8 weeks of endurance training on various biological systems, including gene expression (the transcriptome), proteins (the proteome), fats (the lipidome), metabolites (the metabolome), DNA chemical tags (the epigenome) and the immune system.
The researchers conducted analyses on different tissues in rats trained to run increasing distances and compared these with the tissues of sedentary rats.
They focused on mitochondria in the leg muscles, the heart, liver, kidney, white adipose tissue — which accumulates as body fat — as well as lungs, brain, and brown adipose tissue — a metabolically active fat that burns calories.
This comprehensive approach generated hundreds of thousands of results for non-epigenetic changes and over 2 million distinct epigenetic changes in the mitochondria, providing a rich database for future research.
Alongside the primary goal of creating a database, some notable findings emerged. For instance, the expression of mitochondrial genes changed with exercise across different tissues.
Researchers found that training upregulated genes in the mitochondria of skeletal muscle of rats that are downregulated in the mitochondria in the skeletal muscle of individuals with type 2 diabetes.
They also showed that training upregulated genes in the mitochondria in the livers of rats, that are down regulated in people with cirrhosis.
These two findings suggest that endurance training may help improve muscular function in diabetes, as well as boost liver health.
