BACKGROUND: Through exercise and/or hypoxia to increase the body's stress level and timing of hypoxia, so as to improve the body's adaptation level to exercise and/or hypoxia. However, little was known concerning the effects of acute exercise and/or hypoxia on vascular endothelial cell growth factor (VEGF) expression in skeletal muscles.OBJECTIVE: To study the effects of acute exercise and/or hypoxia on VEGF expression in rats' gastrocnemius muscles. DESIGN, TIME AND SETTING: The randomized controlled animal experiment was performed at the Clinical Laboratory, People's Hospital of Jiangsu Province, between September 2005 and September 2006.MATERIALS: Totally 108 health male SD rats were randomly divided into 6 groups, namely, normoxia quiet, normoxia high intensity, normoxia moderate intensity, hypoxia quiet, living high-training low high intensity and living high-training low high intensity moderated intensity groups, with 12 animals in each group.METHODS: In acute normoxia exercise models, rats were performed adaptive activity at 48 hours prior to experiment. The high intensity exercise was comprised of 50 m/minx1.5 min training with 2 minutes rest. The moderate intensity exercise was 30 m/min×30 min. Hypoxia environment was produced by using low oxygen instrument to simulate hypoxia training, with hypoxia for 3 days, 22 h/d, 12.8% altitude, with 22 ℃ temperature and 55% humidity. In acute training low-living high models, rats were placed in above hypoxia environment after high intensity Or moderate intensity exercise. Four rats were sacrificed at hours 0, 2 and 4 after training, and the gastrocnemius muscles were obtained.MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The expression of VEGF in rats' gastrocnemius muscles was detected by using western-blot.RESULTS: Hypoxia and acute normoxia exercise enhanced the expression of VEGF, hypoxia after exercise weakened exercise-induced VEGF expression, and the exercise with long time and common intensity induced the higher level VEGF expression. The expression of VEGF was the most at the time points of instantaneousness and 2 hour after exercise, the sorting of the recovery speed of VEGF changes from fast to slow was: hypoxia or training low-living high and normoxic exercise. CONCLUSION: The expressions of VEGF in rats' skeletal muscles induced by acute exercise and/or hypoxia belong to the effect of immediate-early, with existing intensity-threshold, which recovery speed is inversely proportional to the expression amplitude;"training low-living high" may be able to enhance the adaptation of skeletal muscles to sports.

AIM:To investigate whether Chinese yellow wine has influences on homocysteine ( Hcy )-induced dysfunction in rat endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs).METHODS:Rat bone marrow was extracted to harvest mononucle-ar cells ( MNCs) by density gradient centrifugation .The MNCs were plated on fibronectin-coated culture dishes , and were induced into EPCs by EGM-2 complete medium supplemented with cell growth factor .The adherent cells were collected 7 d later for all studies .EPCs were characterized as adherent cells double positive for DiI-ac-LDL uptaking and lectin binding by direct fluorescent staining under a laser scanning confocal microscope .The viability, migration, apoptosis and in vitro vasculogenic activity of the EPCs were determined by MTT assay , Transwell chamber assay , apoptosis kit and in vitro vas-culogenesis kit, respectively.RESULTS:Compared with control group, the viability, migration and in vitro vasculogenic capacity of the EPCs in Hcy group were significantly decreased (P<0.01).Compared with Hcy group, yellow wine group and red wine group both significantly improved the viability , migration and in vitro vasculogenic capacity of Hcy-induced EPCs (P<0.01).Compared with control group, yellow wine group and red wine group both significantly improved the a-bove-mentioned functions of EPCs (P<0.05).However, no significant difference of apoptosis in all groups was observed . CONCLUSION:Hcy may result in dysfuction of EPCs .Treatment with yellow wine improves Hcy-induced EPC functions .