While the link between exercise and longevity has been well demonstrated, the effect of specific modes of exercise on modern biological age measures is poorly understood.
With the development of science and technology, transcriptome age (TA) predictors provide an opportunity to test the effect of high-intensity interval exercise (HIIT) on biological age using genome-wide expression data.
On April 20, 2023, Professor Trevor Lohman's team from the School of Allied Health Professions at Loma Linda University in California published an article entitled "High-Intensity interval training reduces transcriptomic age: A randomized controlled trial" in the journal Aging Cell.
The study found that short-term high-intensity interval exercise reduced transcriptome age by 3.59 years.
Participants were recruited from communities around the Loma Linda University campus through flyers, approved social media, and more, using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) to classify men and women ages 40 to 65 who identified as inactive as low-activity.
Participants had no significant change in activity levels in the past 30 days, were not pregnant, had no previous or current history of illness that would render exercise unsafe, and were not currently taking antibiotics, glucocorticoids, anticoagulants, anesthetics, antiepileptic drugs, antipsychotics, or hypoglycemic drugs. In the end, 30 participants met the criteria and were included in the study, randomized to experimental and control groups.
The researchers then analyzed the effects of transcriptome age, PHQ-9, PSS-10, PSQI, skeletal muscle mass, body fat mass, and visceral fat area of the participants.
A decrease in transcriptome age was observed by 3.59 years in the exercise group and an increase of 3.29 years in the control group. In addition, the exercise group's PHQ-9, PSQI, BMI index, body fat mass, and visceral fat indicators were also improved.
Overall, in this randomized controlled trial of the effects of RNA-based biological age measurement, participants in the HIIT group had significantly lower TA and TAaccel. This improvement in biological age was consistent with improvements in body composition, sleep quality scores, and depression scores in the exercise group.
These results suggest that exercise has an effect on age-related patterns of gene expression, an effect that may contribute to the exercise-related longevity effect.