The Effect of an Acute Aerobic Bout on Time Course Alterations of Visceral Adipose Tissue Gene Expression in Diabetic Rats

Diabetes mellitus is a group of metabolic disorders that are characterized by a decline in insulin secretion, insulin malfunction or both. Visfatin is a recently discovered protein that is expressed and secreted in visceral fat tissue. Elevated plasma visfatin levels have been reported in humans with type 2 diabetes mellitus. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a single bout of aerobic exercise on visceral adipose tissue visfatin gene expression in a diabetic rat model. Diabetes was induced by streptozotocin (50 mg/kg) injection in a single dose administered to twenty male Wistar rats (6 – 8 weeks old, 165 ±5 grams weight). The rats were randomly divided into four groups, each comprising five rats; one control group and three exercise groups. The acute aerobic exercise bout required the three exercise groups to complete a single session of running for 50 minutes on a treadmill at a velocity of20m.min-1. Following the treadmill run, one of the exercise groups were anesthetized immediately after the exercise, the second one 4h -after exercise and the last group were anesthetized 24h post exercise. Tissue samples were collected immediately after the animals were anesthetized. To determine the relative levels of gene expression, semi-quantitative RT-PCR was performed. The results showed a significant increase in the expression of visfatin in the 4h and 24h post exercise groups compared with the control group (P