Studies show that exercise can fight chronic inflammation

There are many health benefits to exercising regularly, but did you know that exercising muscles itself can combat chronic inflammation?

According to a recent study led by a biomedical engineer at Duke University, human muscle has the innate ability to prevent the harmful effects of chronic inflammation when exercising.

The results of the study were published in the journal “Science Advances” on January 22nd. This discovery was made possible by the use of laboratory-grown and designed human muscles, demonstrating the potential power of this type of platform in such research activities.

Nenad Versac, a professor of biomedical engineering at Duke, said:

“Our designed muscle platform is modular, which means that different types of cells and tissue components can be combined and combined as needed. But in this case, all muscle cells are uniquely anti-inflammatory. It turns out that it can work. “Versac added.

Inflammation is neither good nor bad in nature. When the body is injured, the first low-level inflammatory response removes debris and helps rebuild the tissue. It also overreacts the immune system, causing an inflammatory response, causing damage like the often deadly cytokine storms caused by some cases of COVID-19. And there are diseases that cause chronic inflammation, such as rheumatoid arthritis and sarcopenia, which can waste muscle and reduce contractile capacity.

Of the many molecules that can cause inflammation, one pro-inflammatory molecule, especially interferon gamma, is associated with various types of muscle wasting and dysfunction. Previous studies in humans and animals have shown that exercise generally helps reduce the effects of inflammation, but muscle cells, not to mention how they interact with certain unpleasant molecules such as interferon. It was difficult to distinguish what role it played. gamma.

“We know that chronic inflammatory diseases cause muscle atrophy, but we wanted to see if the same thing happened to human muscles grown in Petri dishes,” said a postdoctoral fellow at the Versac Institute. Zhaowei Chen, the lead author of the paper, said. ..

“Not only did we confirm that interferon gamma functions primarily through specific signaling pathways, but also that motile muscle cells counteract this pro-inflammatory signaling directly, regardless of the presence of other cell types or tissues. I’ve also shown that I can do it, “Chen added.

To prove that muscle alone can block the destructive power of interferon gamma, Bursac and Chen turned to an artificial muscle platform that the institute has been developing for nearly a decade. They first grew functional human skeletal muscle that contracts in Petri dishes, and since then the lab has improved the process by adding immune and stem cell reservoirs to the recipe.

In the current study, researchers took muscles grown in these fully functional laboratories and soaked them in relatively high levels of interferon gamma for 7 days to mimic the effects of long-term chronic inflammation. As expected, the muscles became smaller and lost much of their power.

The researchers then applied interferon gamma again, but this time also put the muscles into a simulated exercise regime by stimulating the muscles with a pair of electrodes. They expected this procedure to induce some muscle growth, as shown in previous studies, but were surprised to find that it almost completely prevented the effects of chronic inflammation. I did.

They then found that two drugs, tofacitinib and baricitinib, used to treat rheumatoid arthritis in which simulated movement blocks specific molecular pathways in muscle cells and blocks the same pathway, have the same anti-inflammatory effect. I showed that I was there.

“When exercising, the muscle cells themselves were directly opposed to the pro-inflammatory signals evoked by interferon gamma, which we didn’t expect to happen,” Bursac said. Stated.

Follow more stories above Facebook And twitter

This story was published from the Wire Agency Feed without changing the text.