Aerobical Physical Activities Improve Quality of Cardiac Health in an Animal Model: Parameters of Calorimetry, Profile Lipids and Oxidative Stress

Abstract

Occidental life styles, including physical inactivity, are related to risk of developing heart diseases. To prevent or even mitigate these effects, the frequent recommendation has been the practice of physical exercise as a measure of therapeutic interaction in preventive medicine and rehabilitation. Thus, our study was carried out to evidence the effects of aerobic physical exercise regularly practiced, through swimming, calorimetry, lipid profile, and oxidative stress in myocardium. Thirty-two Winstar rats, males, 75 days old were used. Animals were divided into two groups: C (n=8) as the control, which received food and water ad libitum and TR (n=8) as the trained group received the same treatment as C and animals in this group were submitted to swim. Swimming was used as a model of exercise with moderate intensity training for eight weeks. The experimental design was completely randomized with 16 treatments and eight replications, with a significance level of 5% probability. Calorimetry shows lower carbohydrate oxidation and increased lipid oxidation in C when compared with TR. The trained group had higher glucose, higher HDL-cholesterol and lower accumulation of triglycerides, and verified the protective effect in cardiac tissue. Thus, we can conclude that the swimming protocol was effective in controlling deleterious effects caused by poor habits on the myocardium.

Metabolic Disorders Cardiac: Disturbances Triggers by Lack of ATP?

“…Cardiac metabolism is predominantly aerobic, with most of the energy supplied by oxidative phosphorylation. The ATP produced by this pathway is essentially used for contraction [3,[7][8][9].…”

“…Thus, during starvation, the energy demand in the heart is provided by ketone bodies (78%) and fatty acid oxidation (22%) [2,5,7]. This change in substrate preference results from a large increase in the plasma concentration of ketone bodies (from 0.19 to 4 mM for hydroxybutyrate and from 0.17 to 1.2 mM for acetoacetate), increase in fatty acids (from 0.35 to 0.82 mM for palmitate) [2][3][4][5][6][7]14].…”

“…It is well-described glycolysis to supply of ATP in adult heart is small. However, there is evidence that glycolytic pathway greatly contributes to ionic gradients used for depolarization during myocyte excitation, in addition to maintenance of K + and Na + homeostasis [3,7,9,10,11,14]. During the acute increase in effort, glucose oxidation also provides important levels of ATP to cover the high energy demand [3,8].…”

“…Worldwide, cardiovascular diseases are the main cause of death in the occidental lifestyle [1]. In the countries of America, 75% of deaths are associated with heart diseases [2,3].…”

“…The risk of developing heart diseases can be explained by sidereactions of the metabolism, which has been shown to promote oxidative stress through the elevated reactive oxygen species (ROS) production and/or reduced antioxidant defense which causes the decrease of health and well-being of biological systems and their functions [3][4][5].…”