Stanford Medicine study details molecular effects of exercise
A simple blood test may be able to determine how physically fit you are, according to a new study conducted by scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
The test could complement treadmill tests, a more traditional clinical evaluation of fitness, and provide individuals with far more nuanced information about their body’s molecular response to exercise.
The blood test is an offshoot of a complex study conducted by a team of researchers that took hundreds of thousands of molecular measurements from a group of individuals before and after exercising.
“Everybody knows exercise is good for you, but we really don’t know what drives that at a molecular level,” said Michael Snyder, PhD, professor and chair of genetics. “Our goal at the outset was to conduct a highly comprehensive analysis of what’s happening in the body just after exercising.”
The team tracked molecular markers of a wide array of biological processes, such as metabolism, immunity, oxidative stress and cardiovascular function. Hundreds of thousands of measurements from 36 study participants provided a window into the sea of chemical fluctuations the body experiences during intense exercise. To the scientists’ knowledge, such comprehensive measurements of post-exercise molecular fluctuations have never been performed. What’s more, the team saw that the participants who were most physically fit shared similar molecular signatures in their resting blood samples captured before exercise.
“It gave us the idea that we could develop a test to predict someone’s level of fitness,” said Kévin Contrepois, PhD, director of metabolomics and lipidomics in the Department of Genetics. “Aerobic fitness is one of the best measures of longevity, so a simple blood test that can provide that information would be valuable to personal health monitoring.”
With the preliminary data, the team has created a proof-of-principle test, for which they’ve filed a patent application. The test is not currently available to the public.
Already, the team is developing an algorithm to select a subset of these molecules that are highly correlative to peak VO2 results, Contrepois said. As the researchers continue to optimize the fitness test, they hope it can one day be a faster, cheaper and more convenient way for people to objectively measure aerobic fitness.
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