Sports, immunity and stem cells

How Sports Help Immunity

Kirill Stasevich, Science and Life (nkj.ru )

Physical exercises act primarily on the muscles – the load is primarily on them. But muscles rely on bones, which means that bones should also feel some kind of fitness effect. But bones are not a dead mass, they have living cells, blood vessels, and finally, bone marrow. The bone marrow is the home for blood stem cells, from which immune cells are formed. Can exercise, acting through the bones, somehow affect the immune system?

The staff of the Southwest Medical Center of the University of Texas write in Nature that it is so (Shen et al., A mechanosensitive peri-arteriolar niche for osteogenesis and lymphopoiesis). They found that there are special stem cells in the bones on the outside of the blood vessels that go to the bone marrow. Bone tissue cells are formed from them, but, in addition, these stem cells secrete growth factors – special proteins that stimulate the growth of hematopoietic cells of the bone marrow. If the gene of one of the growth factors that acts on the progenitor cells of immune cells is turned off in bone stem cells, the immune system will react worse to bacterial infections.

With age, the number of these special bone stem cells decreases, as does the number of immune cell precursors. But if the bone feels the load, then there will be more of both. It turned out that bone stem cells have a Piezo1 receptor protein that reacts to mechanical stress. With the help of Piezo1, bone stem cells feel physical exertion, which strengthens the bone, and along the way there are more immune progenitor cells in the bone marrow. This is another of the unexpected functions of the Piezo1 mechanical stress receptor.

Experiments were performed with mice that ran in a squirrel wheel, and in which the bone and bone marrow reacted to the load – or did not react if the Piezo1 gene or the gene of the aforementioned growth factor was turned off in mice. If these results apply to us, it turns out that you can stimulate the immune system on the treadmill, or just walking a lot. Most likely, our immunity can also be improved by sports, you just need to understand what efforts you need to make here. At the same time, we remind you that physical exercises benefit not only muscles, bones, metabolism and immunity, but also the brain.

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