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Research Paper|Volume 16, Issue 2|pp 1374—1389

Treadmill exercise can regulate the redox balance in the livers of APP/PS1 mice and reduce LPS accumulation in their brains through the gut-liver-kupffer cell axis

Shunling Yuan1, Yirong Wang2, Jialun Yang1, Yingzhe Tang1, Weijia Wu1, Xiangyuan Meng1, Ye Jian1, Yong Lei1, Yang Liu1, Changfa Tang1, Zhe Zhao1, Fei Zhao3, Wenfeng Liu1
  • 1Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Physical Fitness and Sports Rehabilitation, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410012, China
  • 2Hunan Sports Vocational College, Changsha 410019, China
  • 3Changsha Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Changsha Eighth Hospital), Changsha 410199, China
* Equal contribution
Received: August 15, 2023Accepted: November 21, 2023Published: January 29, 2024

Copyright: © 2024 Yuan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

A growing body of clinical data has shown that patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have symptoms such as liver dysfunction and microbial–gut–brain axis dysfunction in addition to brain pathology, presenting a systemic multisystemic pathogenesis. Considering the systemic benefits of exercise, here, we first observed the effects of long-term treadmill exercise on liver injuries in APP/PS1 transgenic AD mice and explored the potential mechanisms of the gut–liver–brain axis’s role in mediating exercise’s ability to reduce bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) pathology in the brain. The results showed that the livers of the AD mice were in states of oxidative stress, while the mice after long-term treadmill exercise showed alleviation of their oxidative stress, their intestinal barriers were protected, and the ability of their Kupffer cells to hydrolyze LPS was improved, in addition to the accumulation of LPS in their brains being reduced. Notably, the livers of the AD mice were in immunosuppressed states, with lower pro-oxidative and antioxidative levels than the livers of the wild-type mice, while exercise increased both their oxidative and antioxidative levels. These results suggest that long-term exercise modulates hepatic redox homeostasis in AD mice, attenuates oxidative damage, and reduces the accumulation of LPS in the brain through the combined action of the intestine–liver–Kupffer cells.