Exercise-induced autophagy and its role in preventing diabetes | Guido Kroemer
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Exercise – particularly endurance exercise – is linked with many health benefits, including maintaining a healthy weight and preventing diabetes. One of the mechanisms behind the beneficial effects of exercise is its ability to induce autophagy in skeletal muscle and, potentially, other organs. In this clip, Dr. Guido Kroemer describes the anti-diabetes and anti-obesity effects of exercise-induced autophagy.
- Rhonda: But the other thing that induces autophagy, you're mentioning the stress response and oxidative oxygen, and it sort of reminded me of exercise and how exercise also induces autophagy. I've seen some studies where in humans, they've looked at muscle, skeletal muscle, and how aerobic exercise and eccentric and concentric exercise all can activate autophagy in skeletal muscle. Do you know if it activates autophagy in multiple tissues? Exercise?
- Dr. Kroemer: That's something that we have not studied. So, it is known that endurance training is particularly efficient in mice to induce autophagy and that it mediates anti-obesity and anti-diabetic effects that are depending, in a way, on autophagy induction, because genetic modifications of the process that leads to autophagy induction, its inhibition, specifically by exercise, can prevent these anti-diabetic effects.
- Rhonda: Really?
- Dr. Kroemer: Yeah.
- Rhonda: Oh, I didn't know that the role of the exercise in preventing diabetes was shown to be dependent on autophagy to some degree. That's very interesting. So, do you think that has to do with the liver, and the like pancreas, somewhere... I mean, is it known?
- Dr. Kroemer: To know this in detail, it would be necessary to inhibit autophagy specifically in different tissues and, to my knowledge, this has not been done yet.
- Rhonda: Okay. So do you think fasting while you're like exercising in a fasted state... Now, that's another thing that's...do you think that would be important? Or do we... I mean, I've seen some studies in mice where they claim it is, but mice have a very high metabolism. And so, there's a synergy there. But when you look in humans, it's not so important. Like, the exercise can still induce autophagy in skeletal muscle in humans even without being in a fasted state, but the question is like will you synergize more and...
- Dr. Kroemer: You can speculate, but we don't know.
- Rhonda: I'm giving you a lot of ideas here.
An intracellular degradation system involved in the disassembly and recycling of unnecessary or dysfunctional cellular components. Autophagy participates in cell death, a process known as autophagic dell death. Prolonged fasting is a robust initiator of autophagy and may help protect against cancer and even aging by reducing the burden of abnormal cells.
The relationship between autophagy and cancer is complex, however. Autophagy may prevent the survival of pre-malignant cells, but can also be hijacked as a malignant adaptation by cancer, providing a useful means to scavenge resources needed for further growth.
Important for the endocrine enhancing properties of exercise. Exerkines are exercise-induced hormonal-like factors which mediate the systemic benefits of exercise through autocrine, paracrine, and/or endocrine properties.[1]
- ^ Helge, Jørn Wulff; Moritz, Thomas; Morville, Thomas; Clemmensen, Christoffer; Dela, Flemming (2020). Plasma Metabolome Profiling Of Resistance Exercise And Endurance Exercise In Humans Cell Reports 33, 13.
The thousands of biochemical processes that run all of the various cellular processes that produce energy. Since energy generation is so fundamental to all other processes, in some cases the word metabolism may refer more broadly to the sum of all chemical reactions in the cell.
A result of oxidative metabolism, which causes damage to DNA, lipids, proteins, mitochondria, and the cell. Oxidative stress occurs through the process of oxidative phosphorylation (the generation of energy) in mitochondria. It can also result from the generation of hypochlorite during immune activation.
A metabolic disorder characterized by high blood sugar and insulin resistance. Type 2 diabetes is a progressive condition and is typically associated with overweight and low physical activity. Common symptoms include increased thirst, frequent urination, unexplained weight loss, increased hunger, fatigue, and impaired healing. Long-term complications from poorly controlled type 2 diabetes include heart disease, stroke, diabetic retinopathy (and subsequent blindness), kidney failure, and diminished peripheral blood flow which may lead to amputations.
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