Health & Well-Being-Pigs to humans: Inactivity can kill!

Pigs on treadmills? Although the idea may seem comical, it has proven to University of Missouri-Columbia researchers the importance of exercise in preventing heart disease. According to their research exercise can help promote healthy heart function and fend off one of the nation's biggest killers, heart disease.

In 1995, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the College of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Veterinary Biomedical Sciences, the School of Medicine's Department of Physiology, and the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center combined their efforts to study exercise's structural and functional impacts on the cardiovascular system using miniature Yucatan pigs. Since then, the researchers have discovered many different ways in which exercise benefits humans.

"One of the primary risk factors for [cardiovascular] disease is a sedentary, or inactive lifestyle," notes Harold Laughlin, principal investigator on the project and chair of the Department of Veterinary Biomedical Sciences. "Sixty percent of the adult population is inactive at a rate that doubles the chance of heart disease. We need to gain a better understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for exercise-induced changes. Otherwise, activity-related diseases are going to get worse."