Handgrip exercise in models of IR

Exercise training has strong cardioprotective effects in asymptomatic subjects as well as those with established cardiovascular risk and/or disease. Ischaemia-reperfusion (IR) represents a significant and harmful stimulus for tissues, including the myocardium and the vascular endothelium. Studies have found evidence that exercise training is associated with reduced endothelial and cardiac IR injury, which may partly contribute to the protective effects of exercise training. Possibly, acute bouts of exercise possess the ability to prevent endothelial IR injury in humans and potentially myocardial rescue. 

Recent studies have demonstrated that also handgrip exercise has a distinct impact on the ability to prevent endothelial and potentially cardiac IR injury. Such protection through exercise would be similar as observed with ischaemic preconditioning (IPC), i.e. a validated and successful method to prevent endothelial IR injury and is typically applied with short episodes of local arm ischaemia. This raises the question of whether local (forearm) exercise may be sufficient to induce systemic protective effects. This is highly relevant since whole-body training is a demanding type of exercise, which might be difficult to implement in the clinical setting. Local, handgrip exercise, however, would be more feasible to implement in clinical settings to reduce IR injury. Currently, mechanistic insights of exercise preconditionings’ cardioprotection are difficult to assess in vivo, highlighting the need for additional models to explore the effects of single handgrip exercise on myocardial rescue. 

To explore the effect of acute local handgrip exercise on the ability to protect against myocardial damage in ex vivo models of myocardial ischaemia-reperfusion e.g. the Langendorff perfused rat heart, isolated cardiomyocytes from rat heart, and the human heart slices model, and Engineered heart tissue platform. A secondary objective is to explore the potential mechanisms by which single exercise preconditioning elicits beneficial effects on IR injury.

Within-subject design

A single session of local handgrip exercise with an intensity of 50% of their maximal contractile strength.

Handgrip exercise is not associated with a significant health risk in our participants. Blood will be drawn two times for the analysis of cardioprotective factors using ex vivo models of IR. The volunteers will not benefit directly from participating in this study.