the effect of continuous aerobic training on bax/bcl2 ratio in pancreatic tissue diabetic rats

Objective: apoptosis of pancreatic beta cells plays an important role in the pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes. the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of continuous aerobic training on bax/bcl-2 ratio in pancreatic tissue of streptozotocin (stz)-induced diabetic rats. materials and methods: a total number of 40 male wistar rats, were divided into healthy control (hc), healthy trained (ht), diabetic control (dc), and diabetic trained (dt) groups. diabetes was also induced by a single intraperitoneally injection of stz (45 mg/kg). the training groups performed the exercise on the treadmill for five consecutive days within six weeks with 10-18 m/min intensity and 10-30 minute duration based on the principle of overload. the pancreatic tissue levels of the bax and the bcl-2 proteins were further determined via the elisa method. the analysis of variance test (anova) with tukey's post hoc test was used for analyzing the data. results: the results showed that the induction of diabetes had significantly decreased the levels of bcl-2 protein and increased the levels of bax protein and bax/bcl-2 ratio in the pancreatic tissue (p-value=0.001,effect size=0.29). as well, the findings showed that six weeks of aerobic exercise training had significantly increased the levels of bcl-2 and significantly decreased the levels of bax and bax/bcl-2 ratio in the dt group (p-value=0.012, effect size=0.23). conclusion: according to the results of this study, exercise can be considered an effective strategy to reduce the rate of diabetic-induced apoptosis and control its complications.