ABSTRACT
The aim of this report is to show that treadmill running exercise under well-controlled conditions is to improve of regeneration in rat gastrocnemius muscles after physical injury. For this, rats were submitted to bouts of exercise on a treadmill up a 10 degrees decline for 60 min and gastrocnemius muscles were analysed at different exercise periods by immunohistochemistry in comparison with injured nonexercised muscles. Rats were used with guidelines for experimental procedures as set forth in the Declaration of Helsinki. We analysed the regenerative processes by detection of immunoreactivity for the two intermediate filaments, desmin and vimentin. Desmin and vimentin are specific components of the cytoskeleton of striated muscle fibers and of mononuclear cells of mesenchymal origin including myoblasts, respectively. We found that non-exercised rats had more desmin-and vimentin-positive myofibers than that of exercised rats at 9th, 16th, 23th, 30th day after physical injury. At 30th day, non-exercised rats had several desmin-and vimentinpositive myofibers, but exercised rats had numerous normal myofibers. These results show that exercise is able to improve regeneration processes in physical injured gastrocnemius muscles of rats.
