The effect of 6-week endurance training with the consumption of nettle hydroalcoholic extract on testicular tissue apoptosis in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats

Diabetes is a metabolic disease that is associated with infertility disorders and testicular tissue apoptosis. The present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effect of 6 weeks of endurance training along with the consumption of nettle hydroalcoholic extract on the apoptosis of the testicular tissue of diabetic rats.
58 male Wistar rats were randomly divided into five groups: "healthy control", "control diabetes", "exercise diabetes", "supplementary diabetes" and "supplementary exercise diabetes". Diabetes was induced by intraperitoneal injection of 45 mg/kg STZ dissolved in fresh citrate buffer. Nettle plant extract was fed to the animals for 6 weeks. The endurance training protocol was performed for 6 weeks and 48 hours after the last training session, the rats were dissected and their testicular tissue was extracted. Tunnel staining method was used to check the apoptosis of testicular tissue. The results of the Kolmogorov Smirnov and Lunn tests were used to check the normality of the data and the homogeneity of the variances. Also, one-way analysis of variance (Tukey's post hoc test) was used to compare groups for the studied variables.
Data analysis showed that apoptosis was significantly reduced in the "exercise diabetes", "supplementary diabetes" and "supplementary exercise diabetes" groups compared to the "control diabetes" group (P = 0.001). Nettle plant extract and endurance exercise in diabetic rats reduced testicular tissue apoptosis.
Consumption of nettle hydroalcoholic extract along with endurance exercise can reduce the apoptosis of testicular tissue in diabetic rats. Therefore, it is suggested to have exercise as a non-pharmacological intervention and nettle plant, which is a non-chemical intervention, to reduce the complications caused by diabetes in the field of fertility.