Credit: Pennington Biomedical Research Center
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana - Why do some people benefit so much from exercise while others enjoy few health gains or even suffer harm? Does age matter when it comes to exercise s health benefits? Are there molecular signatures - sets of genes, proteins and other variables ¬- that reveal the answers?
Researchers at Pennington Biomedical Research Center plan to answer these and related questions with a new $2.5 million award from the National Institutes of Health s National Institute on Aging. Exercising usually leads to many health benefits. For example, exercise can help offset the declines in cardiorespiratory fitness, physical functioning and cardiometabolic health that come with aging, said Owen Carmichael, Ph.D., Professor and Director, Biomedical Imaging at Pennington Biomedical. This is at least partly because physical activity improves the performance of mitochondria, the power plants of the cell, in skeletal muscle. But
Scientists with Pennington Biomedical Research Center will study how the body s mitochondria affect how much a person is benefited by exercise in a four-year study that will begin in the Spring of 2021.