Exercising muscle can help your body combat chronic inflammation: Study

It seems there is no end to the benefits of exercise, as study finds that working out your muscles can help your body deal with inflammation.
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Work it out to rid your body of inflammation. Image courtesy: Shutterstock
ANI Updated: 30 Oct 2023, 15:57 pm IST
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Whether you want a healthy mind or a healthy body, exercising is a must. Physical activity, then be it in the form of rigorous workout in the gym or just active in your daily life, can ensure you lead an optimum lifestyle.

Here’s a fact about exercising that you need to know about it: exercising muscle can help you combat chronic inflammation.

According to a recent study led by Biomedical engineers at Duke University, the human muscle has an innate ability to ward off the damaging effects of chronic inflammation when exercised.

The results of the study appeared on January 22 in the journal Science Advances.

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The link between exercise and chronic inflammation

“Lots of processes are taking place throughout the human body during exercise, and it is difficult to tease apart which systems and cells are doing what inside an active person,” said Nenad Bursac, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke.

“Our engineered muscle platform is modular, meaning we can mix and match various types of cells and tissue components if we want to. But in this case, we discovered that the muscle cells were capable of taking anti-inflammatory actions all on their own,” Bursac added.

Inflammation is not inherently good or bad. When the body is injured, an initial low-level inflammation response clears away debris and helps tissue rebuild.

Other times, the immune system overreacts and creates an inflammatory response that causes damage, like the often-deadly cytokine storms brought on by some cases of covid-19. And then, there are diseases that lead to chronic inflammation, such as rheumatoid arthritis and sarcopenia, which can cause the muscle to waste away and weaken its ability to contract.

Among many molecules that can cause inflammation, one pro-inflammatory molecule, in particular, interferon-gamma, has been associated with various types of muscle wasting and dysfunction. While previous research in humans and animals has shown that exercise can help mitigate the effects of inflammation in general, it has been difficult to distinguish what role the muscle cells themselves might play, let alone how they interact with specific offending molecules, such as interferon-gamma.

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When you workout, you help your body combat chronic inflammation naturally. Image courtesy: Shutterstock

“We know that chronic inflammatory diseases induce muscle atrophy, but we wanted to see if the same thing would happen to our engineered human muscles grown in a Petri dish,” said Zhaowei Chen, a postdoctoral researcher in Bursac’s laboratory and first author of the paper.

“Not only did we confirm that interferon-gamma primarily works through a specific signaling pathway, but we also showed that exercising muscle cells can directly counter this pro-inflammatory signaling independent of the presence of other cell types or tissues,” Chen added.

Here is how the study was conducted

To prove that muscle alone is capable of blocking interferon gamma’s destructive powers, Bursac and Chen turned to an engineered muscle platform that the laboratory has been developing for nearly a decade. They were first to grow contracting, functional human skeletal muscle in a Petri dish, and since then the lab has been improving its processes by, for example, adding immune cells and reservoirs of stem cells to the recipe.

In the current study, the researchers took these fully functional, lab-grown muscles and inundated them with relatively high levels of interferon-gamma for seven days to mimic the effects of a long-lasting chronic inflammation. As expected, the muscle got smaller and lost much of its strength.

The researchers then applied interferon-gamma again, but this time also put the muscle through a simulated exercise regime by stimulating it with a pair of electrodes. While they expected the procedure to induce some muscle growth, as shown in their previous studies, they were surprised to discover that it almost completely prevented the effects of chronic inflammation.

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Inflammation can make you really sick. Image courtesy: Shutterstock

They then showed that simulated exercise inhibited a specific molecular pathway in muscle cells and that two drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, tofacitinib, and baricitinib, which block the same pathway, had the same anti-inflammatory effect.

“When exercising, the muscle cells themselves were directly opposing the pro-inflammatory signal induced by interferon-gamma, which we did not expect to happen,” said Bursac.

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