Research Paper Volume 15, Issue 6 pp 2308—2320
Curcumin (CUMINUP60®) mitigates exercise fatigue through regulating PI3K/Akt/AMPK/mTOR pathway in mice
- 1 Experimental Center, Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ji’nan, China
- 2 Key Laboratory of Traditional Chinese Medicine Classical Theory, Ministry of Education, Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ji’nan, China
- 3 College of Health Sciences, Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ji’nan, China
- 4 Chenland Research Institute, Qingdao, China
- 5 The First Clinical Medical College, Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ji’nan, China
- 6 Department of Encephalopathy, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ji’nan, China
Received: November 10, 2022 Accepted: March 17, 2023 Published: March 28, 2023
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204614How to Cite
Copyright: © 2023 Hu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Curcumin is a chemical constituent extracted from Curcuma longa L. Several clinical and preclinical studies have demonstrated that it can mitigate exercise fatigue, but the exact mechanism is still unknown. Therefore, we applied a mouse model of exercise fatigue to investigate the possible molecular mechanisms of curcumin’s anti-fatigue effect. Depending on body mass, Kunming mice were randomly divided into control, caffeine (positive drug), and curcumin groups, and were given 28 days intragastric administration. Both the caffeine group and curcumin group showed significant improvement in exercise fatigue compared to the control group, as evidenced by the increase in time to exhaustion, as well as the higher quadriceps coefficient, muscle glycogen (MG) content, and increase in the expression of Akt, AMPK, PI3K, and mTOR proteins. While the curcumin group also significantly improved the exercise fatigue of the mice, demonstrating a lower AMP/ATP ratio and lactic acid (LA) content, and increased glycogen synthase (GS), and myonectin content compared to the caffeine group. Therefore, in the present study, we found that curcumin can exert a similar anti-fatigue effect to caffeine and may act by regulating energy metabolism through modulating the expression of the proteins in the PI3K/Akt/AMPK/mTOR pathway.
Abbreviations
ATP: Adenosine Triphosphate; AMPK: Adenosine 5’-monophosphate activated protein kinase; PI3K: phosphatidylinositol-3-kinases; AKT: protein-serine threonine kinase; mTOR: mammalian target of rapamycin; WB: western blot; LA: lactic acid; MG: muscle glycogen; GS: glycogen synthase.