Exercising regularly has its benefits, however, a brand new study reveals it could help fight chronic inflammation. A recent study led by Biomedical engineers at Duke University reveals that exercise can keep the effects of chronic inflammation away from our muscles. Scientists used lab-grown, engineered human muscle.
Professor of biomedical engineering at Duke, Nenad Bursac said, “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.” They added, “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.”
Postdoctoral researcher and first author of the paper, Zhaowei Chen said, “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. 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.”
