The effect of 6 weeks of treadmill running on JAK1/STAT3 pathway gene expression in the basal ganglia of type 1 diabetic rats.

The JAK/STAT signaling pathway is an important pathway used by cytokines and its excessive activation can lead to various diseases. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of 6 weeks of endurance running on a treadmill on the expression of genes of the JAK1/STAT3 pathway in the basal ganglia of diabetic rats.

40 male rats were randomly divided into four equal groups as follows: control, exercise, diabetes and diabetes +exercise. Diabetes was induced by a single intraperitoneal injection of streptozotocin (STZ, 50 mg/kg body weight). The endurance training program was implemented incrementally for 6 weeks. 48 hours after the last training session, the rats were anesthetized and the brain tissue was removed from the skull to extract the basal ganglia. The extracted tissue was kept at -80 ºC to measure gene expression by qPCR method. One-way ANOVA and LSD post hoc test were used to check the difference between groups. P<0.05 was considered as significance level.

STZ injection to induce type 1 diabetes did not change JAK1/STAT3 gene expression in basal ganglia (P>0.05). Endurance exercise program decreased the expression values of JAK1 (P=0.009) and STAT3 (P=0.002) genes.

In the present study, 6 weeks of endurance running on the treadmill with moderate intensity decreased the expression of JAK1/STAT3 pathway genes. Therefore, this exercise protocol can be suggested as a non-pharmacological tool without side effects to inhibit this pathway in diabetes to protect basal ganglia neurons.