The Role of Autophagy in the Beneficial Effects of Exercise

Autophagy is the name given to a collection of processes responsible for recycling damaged or otherwise unwanted structures and proteins in the cell. With age, autophagy becomes less efficient. Many individual mechanisms falter, and the end result is that cells become more cluttered with damaged parts and harmful proteins. Scaled up across entire organs, this has a meaningful contribution to the progression of aging and age-related disease. Interestingly, increased or more efficient autophagy appears to be a centrally important mechanism in the benefits to health and longevity provided by calorie restriction and a range of other interventions that mildly stress cells. Accordingly, there is a great deal of interest in the research community in developing therapies based on upregulation of autophagy, though progress towards the clinical has been quite slow so far. Regular exercise training helps to improve the body's metabolism. The protective effect of exercise on the cardiovascular system has been increasingly recognized in recent years. Exercise can improve the level of cardiac autophagy, promote cardiomyocytes proliferation, reduce local tissue inflammation, and improve cardiac function. Cardiac autophagy plays a crucial role in exercise-induced cardioprotection as a stress response and is a necessary process for adaptation to exercise. However, there are still many questions to be answered in the study of the protective effects and mechanisms of autophagy as they ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs