Bearing in mind that cancer cachexia is associated with chronic systemic inflammation and that endurance training has been adopted as a nonpharmacological anti-inflammatory strategy, we examined the effect of 8 weeks of moderate intensity exercise upon the balance of anti- and pro-inflammatory cytokines in 2 different depots of white adipose tissue in cachectic tumour-bearing (Walker-256 carcinosarcoma) rats. Animals were assigned to a sedentary control (SC), sedentary tumour-bearing (ST), sedentary pair-fed (SPF) or exercise control (EC), exercise tumour-bearing (ET), and exercise pair-fed (EPF) group. Trained rats ran on a treadmill (60% VO(2)max) 60 min/day, 5 days/week, for 8 weeks. The retroperitoneal (RPAT) and mesenteric (MEAT) adipose pads were excised and the mRNA (RT-PCR) and protein (ELISA) expression of IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α, and IL-10 were evaluated. The number of infiltrating monocytes in the adipose tissue was increased in cachectic rats. TNF-α mRNA in MEAT was increased in the cachectic animals (p<0.05) in relation to SC. RPAT protein expression of all studied cytokines was increased in cachectic animals in relation to SC and SPF (p<0.05). In this pad, IL-10/TNF-α ratio was reduced in the cachectic animals in comparison with SC (p<0.05) indicating inflammation. Exercise training improved IL-10/TNF-α ratio and induced a reduction of the infiltrating monocytes both in MEAT and RPAT (p<0.05), when compared with ST. We conclude that cachexia is associated with inflammation of white adipose tissue and that exercise training prevents this effect in the MEAT, and partially in RPAT.
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