Effect of Physical Exercise on Endometriosis Experimentally Induced in Rats

Mary Lourdes Montenegro, Camila M Bonocher, Juliana Meola, Rafael L Portella, Alfredo Ribeiro-Silva, Alfredo Ribeiro‐Silva, Mariangela O Brunaldi, Mariângela Ottoboni Brunaldi, Rui Alberto Ferriani, Júlio César Rosa e Silva, Julio Cesar Rosa-E-Silva
Reproductive sciences (Thousand Oaks, Calif.) · 2018 · vol. 26(6) , pp. 785–793 · doi:10.1177/1933719118799205 · PMID:30231769 · W2891894825
article OA: green CC0 ⤵ 26 in-corpus citations
🔓 Open OA copy Full text JSON View on OpenAlex View on PubMed View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06+body, 2026-06-09 ⓘ

Physical exercise, regardless of frequency, reduced endometriotic lesion size, decreased matrix metalloproteinases 9 and PCNA levels, and reduced oxidative stress in rats with experimentally induced endometriosis.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

Full text 7,319 characters · extracted from oa-html · 3 sections · click to expand

Abstract

Objective Endometriosis is characterized by the growth of endometrial tissue outside the uterine cavity. The prevalence of endometriosis among women experiencing pain, infertility, or both is as high as 35% to 50%. The most common symptoms of endometriosis are dysmenorrhea, dyspareunia, chronic pelvic pain, and infertility. Evidence has suggested that endometriosis symptoms result from a local inflammatory peritoneal reaction caused by ectopic endometrial implants that undergo cyclic bleeding. On the other hand, regular physical exercise seems to have protective effects against diseases that involve inflammatory processes such as type 2 diabetes and colon and breast cancer. On this basis, it is possible that the practice of physical exercise may have beneficial effects on endometriosis. Therefore, the objective of this study was to evaluate the possible anti-inflammatory effect of physical exercise on endometriosis experimentally induced in rats. Study Design Seventy female Wistar rats were divided into 7groups of 10 animals each. Animals performed light exercise (swimming once a week), moderate exercise (swimming 3 times a week), and intense exercise (swimming 5 times a week) before or after endometriosis induction.

Results

At the end of the experimental protocol, a reduction in the size of endometriotic lesions was observed after physical exercise regardless of its frequency, with a greater reduction in the groups practicing moderate and intense activity; an increase in FAS levels and a decrease in matrix metalloproteinases 9 and proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA)levels was also observed. The immunohistochemistry results did not lead to conclusive results. As expected, oxidative stress was reduced in all groups. These results show that the practice of physical exercise could be beneficial, at least in part, for the treatment of endometriosis. Similar content being viewed by others

References

Giudice LC, Kao LC. Endometriosis. Lancet. 2004;364(9447):1789–1799. Nap AW, Groothuis PG, Demir AY, Evers JL, Dunselman GA. Pathogenesis of endometriosis. Best Pract Res Clin Obstet Gynaecol. 2004;18(2):233–244. Vigano P, Parazzini F, Somigliana E, Vercellini P. Endometriosis: epidemiology and aetiological factors. Best Pract Res Clin Obstet Gynaecol. 2004;18(2):177–200. Donnez J, Van Langendonckt A, Casanas-Roux F, et al. Current thinking on the pathogenesis of endometriosis. Gynecol Obstet Invest. 2002;54(Suppl 1):52–62. Sampson J. Peritonial endometriosis due to menstrual dissemination of endometrial tissue into the peritonial cavity. Am J Obstet Gynecol 1927;14:422–469. Braun DP, Ding J, Shen J, Rana N, Fernandez BB, Dmowski WP. Relationship between apoptosis and the number of macrophages in eutopic endometrium from women with and without endometriosis. Fertil Steril. 2002;78(4):830–835. Lebovic DI, Mueller MD, Taylor RN. Immunobiology of endometriosis. Fertil Steril. 2001;75(1):1–10. Chung HW, Lee JY, Moon HS, et al. Matrix metalloproteinase-2, membranous type 1 matrix metalloproteinase, and tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-2 expression in ectopic and eutopic endometrium. Fertil Steril. 2002;78(4):787–795. Abrão M. Endometriose: Uma Visão Contemporânea. 1st ed. São Paulo, SP: Revinter Ltda; 2000. Iwabe T, Harada T, Tsudo T, et al. Tumor necrosis factor-alpha promotes proliferation of endometriotic stromal cells by inducing interleukin-8 gene and protein expression. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2000;85(2):824–829. Van Langendonckt A, Casanas-Roux F, Donnez J. Oxidative stress and peritoneal endometriosis. Fertil Steril. 2002;77(5):861–870. Demarzo MM, Martins LV, Fernandes CR, et al. Exercise reduces inflammation and cell proliferation in rat colon carcinogenesis. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2008;40(4):618–621. Thune I, Furberg AS. Physical activity and cancer risk: dose-response and cancer, all sites and site-specific. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2001;33(Suppl 6):S530–S550; discussion S609-10. An P, Rice T, Gagnon J, et al. A genetic study of sex hormone-binding globulin measured before and after a 20-week endurance exercise training program: the heritage family study. Metabolism. 2000;49(8):1014–1020. Stoll BA. Adiposity as a risk determinant for postmenopausal breast cancer. Int J Obesity. 2000;24(5):527–533. Garcia-Velasco JA, Arici A. Interleukin-8 expression in endometrial stromal cells is regulated by integrin-dependent cell adhesion. Mol Hum Reprod. 1999;5(12):1135–1140. Gazvani MR, Christmas S, Quenby S, Kirwan J, Johnson PM, Kingsland CR. Peritoneal fluid concentrations of interleukin-8 in women with endometriosis: relationship to stage of disease. Hum Reprod. 1998;13(7):1957–1961. Bonocher CM, Montenegro ML, Rosa-e-Silva JC, Ferriani RA, Meola J. Endometriosis and physical exercises: a systematic review. Reprod biol Endocrinol. 2014;12:4. Gobatto CA, de Mello MA, Sibuya CY, de Azevedo JR, dos Santos LA, Kokubun E. Maximal lactate steady state in rats submitted to swimming exercise. Comp Biochem Physiol A Mol Integr Physiol. 2001;130(1):21–27. Manchado FB, Gobatto CA, Voltarelli FA, Rostom de Mello MA. Non-exhaustive test for aerobic capacity determination in swimming rats. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. 2006;31:731–736. Liu X, Yang le J, Fan SJ, Jiang H, Pan F. Swimming exercise effects on the expression of HSP70 and iNOS in hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in combined stress. Neurosci Lett. 2010;476(2):99–103. Liu W, Xu Y, Lu J, Zhang Y, Sheng H, Ni X. Swimming exercise ameliorates depression-like behaviors induced by prenatal exposure to glucocorticoids in rats. Neurosci Lett. 2012;524(2):119–123. Weigel MT, Kramer J, Schem C, et al. Differential expression of MMP-2, MMP-9 and PCNA in endometriosis and endometrial carcinoma. Eur J Obstet Gynecol Reprod Biol. 2012;160(1):74–78. Cook RD, Weisberg S. Transforming a Response Variable for Linearity. Biometrika. 1994;81:731–737. Febbraio MA, Pedersen BK. Contraction-induced myokine production and release: is skeletal muscle an endocrine organ? Exerc Sport Sci Rev. 2005;33(3):114–119. Pedersen BK, Steensberg A, Fischer C, et al. Searching for the exercise factor: is IL-6 a candidate? J muscle Res Cell Motil. 2003;24(2–3):113–119. Rosa-e-Silva JC, Garcia SB, De Sá Rosa-e-Silva AC, et al. Increased cell proliferation in experimentally induced endometriosis in rabbits. Fertil Steril. 2010;93(5):1637–1642. Jones RC. The effect of a luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone antagonist on experimental endometriosis in the rat. Acta Endocrinol. 1987;114(3):379–382. Schor E, Baracat EC, Simões MJ, de Freitas V, Giannotti Filho O, de Lima GR. Effects of conjugated estrogens and progestogen in surgically induced endometriosis in oophorectomized rats. Clin Exp Obst Gynecol. 1999;26(3–4):3–4. Wren JD, Wu Y, Guo SW. A system-wide analysis of differentially expressed genes in ectopic and eutopic endometrium. Hum Reprod. 2007;22(8):2093–2102. Author information Authors and Affiliations Corresponding author Rights and permissions About this article Cite this article Montenegro, M.L., Bonocher, C.M., Meola, J. et al. Effect of Physical Exercise on Endometriosis Experimentally Induced in Rats. Reprod. Sci. 26, 785–793 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/1933719118799205 Published: Version of record: Issue date: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1933719118799205

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-html ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Condition tags

mesh:D004715endometriosis

MeSH descriptors

Endometriosis Physical Conditioning, Animal Animals Disease Models, Animal Endometriosis Endometriosis Endometriosis Endometrium Endometrium fas Receptor fas Receptor fas Receptor Female Inflammation Inflammation Matrix Metalloproteinase 9 Matrix Metalloproteinase 9 Matrix Metalloproteinase 9 Oxidative Stress Oxidative Stress

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

References (34)

Cited by (26)

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-06-04T01:30:01.192114+00:00
openalex
last seen: 2026-06-04T00:00:01.174412+00:00
pubmed
last seen: 2026-05-13T22:19:31.300640+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK