The anti-inflammatory effect of exercise: its role in diabetes and cardiovascular disease control
Four pages on PainSci cite Pedersen 2006: 1. Quite a Stretch 2. Guide to Repetitive Strain Injuries 3. Chronic, Subtle, Systemic Inflammation 4. Exercise is anti-inflammatory medicine for injuries (Member Post)
PainSci commentary on Pedersen 2006: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
This paper is one of dozens by exercise physiologist Dr. Bente K. Pedersen, who has studied exercise as medicine for non-communicable disease for thirty years, and especially “the myokine concept.” This explores the early (mid-2000s) evidence for the hypothesis that “skeletal muscle is a endocrine organ with the capacity to produce so called ‘myokines,’ i.e. cytokines and other peptides that are produced, expressed, and released by muscle fibers and exert either autocrine, paracrine or endocrine effects” (as summarized here), and those molecules mediate "beneficial health effects against chronic diseases associated with low-grade inflammation such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.”
That hypothesis has generally been confirmed over years. For Dr. Pedersen’s 2023 update (concise and readable), see “From the discovery of myokines to exercise as medicine.”
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Chronic low-grade systemic inflammation is a feature of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Regular exercise offers protection against all-cause mortality, primarily by protection against atherosclerosis and insulin resistance and there is evidence that physical training is effective as a treatment in patients with chronic heart diseases and type 2 diabetes. Regular exercise induces anti-inflammatory actions. During exercise, IL-6 (interleukin-6) is produced by muscle fibres. IL-6 stimulates the appearance in the circulation of other anti-inflammatory cytokines such as IL-1ra (interleukin-1 receptor antagonist) and IL-10 (interleukin-10) and inhibits the production of the pro-inflammatory cytokine TNF-alpha (tumour necrosis factor-alpha). In addition, IL-6 enhances lipid turnover, stimulating lipolysis as well as fat oxidation. It is suggested that regular exercise induces suppression of TNF-alpha and thereby offers protection against TNF-alpha-induced insulin resistance. Recently, IL-6 was introduced as the first myokine, defined as a cytokine, that is produced and released by contracting skeletal muscle fibres, exerting its effects in other organs of the body. Myokines may be involved in mediating the beneficial health effects against chronic diseases associated with low-grade inflammation such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
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