The Effect of Continuous Aerobic Training on Bax/Bcl2 Ratio in Pancreatic Tissue Diabetic Rats

Objective: Apoptosis of pancreatic beta cells plays an important role in the pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes. the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of continuous aerobic training on Bax/Bcl-2 ratio in pancreatic tissue of streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic rats. Materials and Methods: A total number of 40 male Wistar rats, were divided into healthy control (HC), healthy trained (HT), diabetic control (DC), and diabetic trained (DT) groups. Diabetes was also induced by a single intraperitoneally injection of STZ (45 mg/kg). the training groups performed the exercise on the treadmill for five consecutive days within six weeks with 10-18 m/min intensity and 10-30 minute duration based on the principle of overload. the pancreatic tissue levels of the Bax and the Bcl-2 proteins were further determined via the ELISA method. The analysis of variance test (ANOVA) with Tukey s post hoc test was used for analyzing the data. Results: The results showed that the induction of diabetes had significantly decreased the levels of Bcl-2 protein and increased the levels of Bax protein and Bax/Bcl-2 ratio in the pancreatic tissue (P-value=0.001,Effect Size=0.29). As well, the findings showed that six weeks of aerobic exercise training had significantly increased the levels of Bcl-2 and significantly decreased the levels of Bax and Bax/Bcl-2 ratio in the DT group (P-value=0.012, Effect Size=0.23). Conclusion: According to the results of this study, exercise can be considered an effective strategy to reduce the rate of diabetic-induced apoptosis and control its complications.