As we all know, exercise is one of the healthiest things you can do for your body, and is particularly effective against cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. CVD, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome are typically associated with low levels of chronic inflammation, which can be counteracted by exercise. Exercise stimulates muscle fibers to produce IL-6, which causes the release of other anti-inflammatory cytokines, inhibits TNF-alpha, and stimulates lypolysis and fat oxidation. TNF-alpha plays a role in insulin resistance, which is a characteristic of metabolic syndrome and diabetes. During exercise TNF-alpha is not released, and plasma IL-6 levels increase 20-fold. This paper focused on acute exercise’s influence on inflammation, and said that the long-term benefits of exercise have not been proven, which I found interesting. The paper mainly subscribed long-term exercise’s effectiveness as many acute bouts of exercise, and each individual workout had positive effects on inflammation. Moral of the story: exercise is good for keeping chronic inflammation at bay and preventing and/or treating CVD, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. It’s also great stress relief during finals!
Peterson AMW, Pedersen BK. "The anti-inflammatory effect of exercise." J Appl Physiol 98: 1154-1162, 2005.
No proven long-term benefits of exercise? Hmmm.. I wonder if they had an over-weight reviewer.
ReplyDeleteI read a review article about the effect of diet induced weight loss and exercise on reducing inflammation. According to the review the studies done on this were limited in sample size or lacked controls. None of the studies compared the effects of just exercise. I would also be interested in seeing the effect of exercise combined with common drugs used in CVD like Statin. Exercise to some extent is always beneficial but I think more research needs to be done on its exact effect relating to inflammation.
ReplyDeleteBy addressing the acute response to exercise, the paper was able to give numerical values of certain inflammatory responses to the benefits of exercise. Perhaps if they were able to follow the participants for an extended period of time (25 or more years) they would also be able to give values for the long term benefits of regular exercise. By stating that exercise is able to prevent certain diseases (a lot of which develop over time), I think it is pointing at the long term benfits.
ReplyDeleteGood point Angel,i would've also loved to see a follow up on participants long term because you definitely want to see how things play out. Also, whenever your talking about exercise, diet usually comes to play so i would also have liked to see the effects of these so called many acute bouts of exercises combined with diet.
ReplyDeleteHard to believe there is a lack of data for long term exercise benefits. By promoting Il-10, increased fat metabolism, increased in healthy cytokines such as adiponectin, increase in aerobic metabolism, increase in oxygen levels, increase of myocardium performance, increase of endorphins, increase in sufferance, decrease in stress, decrease of negative chemokines, inhibition of TNF-alpha, and tons of other benefits that clearly outweigh the cons of exercising, it seems clear that the short term gains in exercising will pave the road to long term health. Heck, if you throw in a healthy diet, then you've done all that you can to reasonably protect yourself from falling victim to chronic diseases that stem from sedentary lifestyles.
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