Effects of aerobic training and High Fat Diet on the Gene Expression of Bax and Bcl-2 in the myocardium of adolescent male rats

The aim of this study was to determine the Effects of aerobic training and High Fat Diet on the Gene Expression of Bax and Bcl-2 in the myocardium of adolescent male rats.

forty young male rats (30 days old) randomized in normal diet control (NDC), normal diet training (NDT), high fat diet control (HFDC) and high fat diet training (HFDT) groups. HFD rats followed high fat regimen (5.817 kcal/g) for 30 days and the normal fat diet (3.801 kcal/g) was continued following to the 60th day of birth. Aerobic training was conducted for four weeks included on three training sessions from the 70th to 98th days of life.

Our findings showed that in HFD groups the expression of Bax protein (from the apoptotic susceptible protein family) was increased and exercise was quite effective in preventing this increase. Instead, the high-fat diet caused a (but brief and insignificant) decrease in the expression of the BCL2 protein (from the family of anti-apoptotic proteins), although the effect of exercise and high-fat diet was not significant. Also, High fat diet increased the ratio of Bax protein expression to BCL2 protein expression (as an index of overall outcome reflecting , while training was well able to prevent this increase.

Overall, based on the results of this study, we conclude that consumption of high fat diet may also induce cardiac apoptosis even in adolescence and in addition to good physical activity in neutralizing these adverse effects of high fat diet is helpful.