Immune system involvement in skeletal muscle adaptation to contractile activity during human growth

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Most people would agree that exercise for children is essential, but recent statistics tell us that 3 out of 5 Canadian children are not active enough for optimal growth and development, which this proposal defines as the healthy function of tissues (e.g., skeletal muscle).  The problems are that 1) the type of exercise that best promotes tissue health in children is unknown, and 2) we do not fully understand the mechanisms that translate exercise into optimal tissue function during human growth.  What we do know is that exercise in children activates immune factors with the capacity to benefit tissue function.     The long-term goal of my research program is to clarify the role of the immune system in linking exercise with muscle adaptation during human growth.  I will first determine the type of exercise in children that results in a balance of immune factors that would be considered optimal for muscle adaptation.  I suspect that exercise mimicking children's play will result in this optimal balance.  I will next make use of the fact that childhood is characterized by periods of rapid growth to examine how maturation is associated with the growth effects of exercise.  I expect that more mature children will exhibit stronger growth-related responses to exercise, as this is required to sustain their increased growth rate.  With a clearer understanding of the above issues, I plan to implement novel approaches to uncover the properties of children's muscle cells that link growth-related processes with an exercise environment.     My research program proposes a new idea that a child's immune system works to help exercise optimize tissue function.  In today's society when most children are not active enough for optimal growth and development, the value of pediatric exercise science cannot be neglected.  Use of sophisticated and powerful approaches designed to reveal mechanisms that translate exercise into optimal growth and development will represent a significant contribution to the field.  Importantly, this program will produce information with broad importance to other disciplines interested in how muscle adapts to exercise in health and disease.