The benefits of Exercise (Ex) on hypertension (HTN) have been well established. Researchers could not ignore the evidence of gut dysbiosis and an impaired gut-brain axis, and they inferred that altering the composition of gut microbiota and improving the impaired gut-brain axis would in part be linked to a favorable impact of exercise. Male spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) and Wistar Kyoto rats (WKY) were subjected to three groups of training, sedentary, and detraining. Rats who had been trained were subjected to moderate-intensity exercise for 12 weeks, whereas those that had been detrained underwent 8 weeks of moderate-intensity exercises. Every set of training was followed by 4 weeks of detraining. Researchers studied fecal microbiota, intestinal inflammation, gut pathology, brain microglia, permeability, and neuroinflammation. In the SHR, it was discovered that exercise training led to a long-term decrease in systolic blood pressure. It was linked with an increase in microbial α diversity, a change in β diversity, and an increase in beneficial bacterial genera. In addition to that, in SHR, exercise lowered the number of activated microglia, neuroinflammation in the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus, improved gut pathology, inflammation, and permeability. Surprisingly, short-term detraining did not eliminate these exercise-induced gains. Lastly, transplanting feces from exercised SHR to sedentary SHR produced results such as reduced SBP and a better gut-brain axis. These findings strengthen the hypothesis that an impaired gut-brain axis is associated with HTN and that exercise improves this connection, resulting in antihypertensive effects.
Link:www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2020.1854642
