Sci Adv: Exercising muscles helps fight chronic inflammation

December 26, 2020 // -- Recently, biomedical engineers at Duke University demonstrated that human muscles can resist the destructive effects of chronic inflammation when exercised.
the discovery was made by using laboratory-grown, engineered human muscles.
results were published online online in the journal Science Advance.
, a professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, said: "There are so many events in the body during exercise that it's hard to figure out which systems and cells are doing in the body.
our engineering muscle platform is modular, which means we can mix and match various types of cellular and tissue components as needed.
, we found that muscle cells were able to take anti-inflammatory action on their own.
" inflammatory response is not inherently good or bad.
when the body is injured, the initial low-level inflammatory response removes the damaged tissue and helps it rebuild.
, the immune system overreacts and produces an inflammatory response that can cause damage, such as deadly cytokine storms caused by certain COVID-19 cases.
some diseases can lead to chronic inflammation, such as rheumatoid arthritis, which can lead to muscle loss and impair their ability.
in many molecules that cause inflammation, interferon γ known to be associated with various types of muscle loss and dysfunction.
Though previous studies in humans and animals have shown that exercise can often help reduce the effects of inflammation, it is difficult to distinguish between the roles that muscle cells themselves may play, let alone how they interact with specific harmful molecules, such as interferon γ.
"We know that chronic inflammatory diseases cause muscle atrophy, but we wanted to see if the same thing could happen to human-engineered muscles growing in petri dishes," said Zhaowei Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at Bursac Labs and lead author of the paper.
Not only do we confirm that interferon γ works primarily through specific signaling pathways, but we also demonstrate that exercise muscle cells can directly resist this inflammatory signaling, independent of the presence of other cell types or tissues.
" In the current study, the researchers used fully functional laboratory muscle tissue and stimulated it for seven days with a relatively high level of interferon γ to mimic the effects of long-term persistent chronic inflammation.
as expected, the muscles get smaller and lose a lot of strength.
researchers then used interferon γ again, but this time by stimulating the muscles with a pair of electrodes to keep them in simulated motion.
as their previous research showed, although they expected the procedure to induce some muscle growth, they found that the treatment virtually completely prevented the effects of chronic inflammation.
, they found that simulating muscle movement inhibited specific molecular pathways in muscle cells, creating an anti-inflammatory effect.
() Source: Exercise muscle combats on its original source: Z. Chen el al., "Exercise mimetics and JAK resedion attenuate IFN-γ-induced wasting in engineered human skeletal muscle," Science Advances (2020). advances.sciencemag.org/lookup . . . 1126/sciadv.abd9502