long-term aerobic exercise with curcumin supplementation improves cardiac fibrosis via tgf-β1/traf6/ctgf signaling in brain tumor of rats

The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of aerobic exercise and nano-curcumin supplementation on cardiac tgf-β1/traf6 and ctgf pathways in rat with brain tumors. forty male wistar rats were divided into 5 groups (n=8 in each) of healthy control, brain tumor, tumor + aerobic exercise (ae), tumor + nanocurcumin (n-cur) and tumor+ae+n-cur. glioblastoma was injected into the rats in the frontal cortex. nano curcumin supplement at the dose of 80 mg/kg was gavage for 4 weeks, 5 days a week. the training groups performed aerobic exercises on the treadmill for 4 weeks, 3 days a week at a speed of 18 meters per minute, for 25-40 minutes. at the end, the rats were sacrificed and tgf-β1, traf6, ctgf were analyzed from the myocardium by real-time pcr method. compared to the healthy control group, tumor group significantly increased tgf-β1 mrna and traf6 mrna in the myocardium (p<0.05). also, compared to the healthy control group, all tumor groups showed a significant increase in ctgf mrna expression (p<0.05). in contrast to the tumor group, the tumor+ae and tumor+ae+n-cur groups showed a significant decrease in tgf-β1 mrna at myocardium (p=0.0010 and p=0.0002, respectively). it seems that aerobic exercise or exercise with nano-curcumin supplement has better protective effects on the heart of tumor rats with downregulation of tgf-β1. it is suggested that different doses and various exercise modalities should be investigated to control cardiac fibrosis from the tgf-β1/traf6 and ctgf pathways.