Exercise training lowers the enhanced tonically active glutamatergic input to the rostral ventrolateral medulla inhypertensive rats.

CNS Neurosci Ther. 2013 Apr;19(4):244-51. Zha YP, Wang YK, Deng Y, Zhang RW, Tan X, Yuan WJ, Deng XM, Wang WZ. “It is well known that low-intensity exercise training (ExT) is beneficial to cardiovascular dysfunction in hypertension”. The authors investigated the effects of exercise training on glutamatergic inputs in the RVLM of a spontaneously hypertensive rats. The animals were treadmill trained for about 12 weeks. The authors observed that exercise trained SHR rats had significantly blunted responses of arterial pressure, heart rate and renal sympathetic nerve activity to bilateral microinjection of Kynurenic acid in the RVLM compared to sedentary SHRs. The authors found that exercise trained SHRs had reduced glutamate concentration (measured by HPLC) and the lower protein expression of vesicular glutamate transporter 2 (that packs the glutamate in the presynaptic terminal). The authors suggest that exercise training lowered the enhanced glutamatergic input in the RVLM in SHRs and this could be the possible mechanism by which it reduced blood pressure and sympathetic nerve activity in them.-Madhan