Exercise for health and wellbeing

Physical activity, health and wellbeing

Research in this theme concerns basic and applied science approaches to increase understanding of the impact of exercise on health and the benefits of combining exercise, nutrition and psychological interventions to interrogate lifestyle-related conditions such as diabetes, obesity and age-related sarcopaenia.

This research theme has received over £450k of capital investment from the University of Brighton in the last three years providing state of the art facilities for research into human function. In addition, new strategic collaborations are being developed with colleagues at BSMS, University of Sussex and BSUH such as with Hugo Critchley and Pietro Ghezzi at the BSMS clinical imagining facility. Research collaborations are now established across many disciplines and research clusters within the University of Brighton (PABS, School of Health Sciences) and with other institutions in the UK (e.g. Universities of Glasgow, Swansea, Westminster and Nottingham) and abroad (e.g. Universities of Rome, Leuven, Tartu/Tallinn, Madrid, Tokyo, Beijing).

A particular focus of this research theme is the use of lifestyle modifications such as exercise and nutritional interventions in reducing health risk for sedentary, disabled or overweight, often diabetic, individuals. There is a sparsity of research on the long-term consequences of sport participation on health especially in disabled athletes. For athletes with a disability, their injury could have major health implications with significant impact on activities of daily living. Plans are therefore also underway to conduct retrospective and prospective studies using former British Paralympians and matched controls to assess the impact of sporting participation on health and wellbeing in collaboration with the Arthritis Research UK Centre for Sport, Exercise and Osteoarthritis (Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust).

Ageing and diabetes research carried out in this theme is aimed at understanding the consequences of exercise and nutrition on diabetes, muscle growth and human function. Ageing is associated with progressive loss of function, some due to mental processing (expressed in its extreme as dementia) and some to muscle mass loss (sarcopaenia).

There is good evidence that exercise may improve the maintenance of muscle mass and brain tissue, alleviating the progress of age-related reduction in function. Ageing influences protein synthesis and breakdown; consequently growth potential, repair and maintenance are also attenuated. With respect to the response to food and exercise, the protein synthetic machinery seems inadequate and differentially regulated in the elderly when compared with younger individuals, the response to feeding being a blunted rise in protein synthesis and reduced effect on the signalling pathways regulating it. Whether this arises from changes in nutritional input, exercise, the ageing process itself, hormonal changes associated with ageing or a combination of these factors, is still under investigation.

The nature of the deficit underlying age-related muscle wasting remains controversial. Under the right conditions of nutrition and exercise elderly muscle can show growth or at least halt further wasting. The elderly show a lower anabolic sensitivity and responsiveness of muscle protein synthesis to essential amino acids and such mechanisms may provide suitable targets for research aimed at improving the responsiveness of older people to exercise and nutrition or reversing the attenuation observed. There is an urgent need to understand the impact of exercise and nutrition on the ageing process in healthy, diseased and affected or high-risk groups.

Research projects