We all know exercise if good for our body but we hardly know what effect it has on the molecular level. A new study conducted by scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine found the body’s molecular response to exercise.
The researchers who conducted the complex study took hundreds of thousands of molecular measurements from a group of individuals before and after exercising. The even conducted blood test and found that it may be able to determine how physically fit you are.
“Everybody knows exercise is good for you, but we really don’t know what drives that at a molecular level,” said Michael Snyder, Ph.D., professor and chair of genetics. “Our goal at the outset was to conduct a highly comprehensive analysis of what’s happening in the body just after exercising,” he added.
The team tracked molecular markers of a wide array of biological processes, such as metabolism, immunity, oxidative stress and cardiovascular function. There were 36 participants and hundreds of thousands of measurements provided a window into the sea of chemical fluctuations the body experiences during intense exercise.
This is first of its kind known research which performed such comprehensive measurements of post-exercise molecular fluctuations. What’s more, the team saw that the participants who were most physically fit shared similar molecular signatures in their resting blood samples captured before exercise.
“It gave us the idea that we could develop a test to predict someone’s level of fitness,” said Kévin Contrepois, PhD, director of metabolomics and lipidomics in the Department of Genetics. “Aerobic fitness is one of the best measures of longevity, so a simple blood test that can provide that information would be valuable to personal health monitoring.”
With the preliminary data, the team has created a proof-of-principle test, for which they’ve filed a patent application. The test is not currently available to the public.
A paper describing the study was published May 28 in Cell. Snyder, who holds the Stanford W. Ascherman, MD, FACS, Professorship in Genetics, and Francois Haddad, MD, clinical professor of medicine, are co-senior authors of the study.
Contrepois shares lead authorship with postdoctoral scholars Si Wu, PhD, and Daniel Hornburg, PhD, and with clinical assistant professor Kegan Moneghetti, MD, PhD.
