Aerobic exercise increases sprouting angiogenesis in the male rat motor cortex
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Aerobic exercise increases sprouting angiogenesis in the male rat motor cortex Morgan E. Stevenson1 · Chelsea C. Miller1 · Heather A. Owen2 · Rodney A. Swain1 Received: 17 February 2020 / Accepted: 10 June 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Exercise is beneficial to brain health, and historically, the advantageous effects of exercise on the brain have been attributed to neuronal plasticity. However, it has also become clear that the brain vascular system also exhibits plasticity in response to exercise. This plasticity occurs in areas involved in movement, such as the motor cortex. This experiment aimed to further characterize the effects of exercise on structural vascular plasticity in the male rat motor cortex, by specifically identifying whether features of angiogenesis, the growth of new capillaries, or changes in vessel diameter were present. Male rats in the exercise group engaged in a 5-week bout of voluntary wheel running, while a second group of rats remained sedentary. After the exercise regimen, vascular corrosion casts, resin replicas of the brain vasculature, were made for all animals and imaged using a scanning electron microscope. Results indicate sprouting angiogenesis was the primary form of structural vascular plasticity detected in the motor cortex under these aerobic exercise parameters. Additionally, exercised rats displayed a slight increase in capillary diameter and expanded endothelial cell nuclei diameters in this region. Keywords Angiogenesis · Arteriogenesis · Aerobic exercise · Vascular corrosion cast · Scanning electron microscopy
Introduction It is well established that aerobic exercise benefits brain health (Cotman and Berchtold 2002; Hillman et al. 2008; Voss et al. 2011; Swain et al. 2012). Exercise mitigates the negative impact of aging on the brain and produces cognitive benefits across all age groups (Cotman and Berchtold 2002; Voss et al. 2011). Exercise is associated with improved performance on learning and memory tasks, and provides neuroprotection from ischemic insult and diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease (Cotman and Berchtold 2002; Hillman et al. 2008; Voss et al. 2011). Exerciseinduced plasticity has been detected in several brain regions, including the hippocampus (van Praag et al. 1999a, 2005; * Morgan E. Stevenson [email protected] * Rodney A. Swain [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of WisconsinMilwaukee, 2441 E. Hartford Ave. Garland Hall, Milwaukee, WI, USA
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA
2
Lopez-Lopez et al. 2004; Clark et al. 2009; Kerr et al. 2010), prefrontal cortex (Brockett et al. 2015), motor cortex (Kleim et al. 2002; Swain et al. 2003), cerebellum (Black et al. 1990; Isaacs et al. 1992), and striatum (Li et al. 2005; Ding et al. 2006a). Based on the vast and robust benefits of exercise on brain health, it is of interest to discern the neurobiological mechanisms by which exercise produces thes
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