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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 8|pp 6852—6864

Swimming exercise stimulates IGF1/ PI3K/Akt and AMPK/SIRT1/PGC1α survival signaling to suppress apoptosis and inflammation in aging hippocampus

Jing-Ying Lin1, Wei-Wen Kuo2, Rathinasamy Baskaran3, Chia-Hua Kuo4, Yun-An Chen2, William Shao-Tsu Chen5, Tsung-Jung Ho6, Cecilia Hsuan Day7, B. Mahalakshmi8, Chih-Yang Huang9,10,11,12
  • 1Department of Medical Imaging and Radiological Science, Central Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taichung, Taiwan
  • 2Department of Biological Science and Technology, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan
  • 3Department of Bioinformatics and Medical Engineering, Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan
  • 4Laboratory of Exercise Biochemistry, University of Taipei, Taipei, Taiwan
  • 5Division of Addictive Medicine, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, Buddhist Tzu Chi Medical Foundation, Tzu Chi University, Hualien, Taiwan
  • 6Department of Chinese Medicine, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, Buddhist Tzu Chi Medical Foundation, Tzu Chi University, Hualien, Taiwan
  • 7Department of Nursing, MeiHo University, Pingtung, Taiwan
  • 8Institute of Research and Development, Duy Tan University, Da Nang, Vietnam
  • 9Graduate Institute of Biomedical Sciences, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan
  • 10Center of General Education, Buddhist Tzu Chi Medical Foundation, Tzu Chi University of Science and Technology, Hualien, Taiwan
  • 11Department of Medical Research, China Medical University Hospital, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan
  • 12Department of Biotechnology, Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan
* Equal contribution
Received: December 13, 2019Accepted: March 9, 2020Published: April 22, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103046

Copyright © 2020 Lin et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Hippocampus is one of the most vulnerable brain regions in terms of age-related pathological change. Exercise is presumed to delay the aging process and promote health because it seems to improve the function of most of the aging mechanisms. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of swimming exercise training on brain inflammation, apoptotic and survival pathways in the hippocampus of D-galactose-induced aging in SD rats. The rats were allocated to the following groups: (1) control; (2) swimming exercise; (3) induced-aging by injecting D-galactose; (4) induced-aging rats with swimming exercise. The longevity-related AMPK/SIRT1/PGC-1α signaling pathway and brain IGF1/PI3K/Akt survival pathway were significantly reduced in D-galactose-induced aging group compared to non-aging control group and increased after exercise training. The inflammation pathway markers were over-expressed in induced-aging hippocampus, exercise significantly inhibited the inflammatory signaling activity. Fas-dependent and mitochondrial-dependent apoptotic pathways were significantly increased in the induced-aging group relative to the control group whereas they were decreased in the aging-exercise group. This study demonstrated that swimming exercise not only reduced aging-induced brain apoptosis and inflammatory signaling activity, but also enhanced the survival pathways in the hippocampus, which provides one of the new beneficial effects for exercise training in aging brain.