Ferritin Genes Overexpression in PBMC and a Rise in Exercise Performance as an Adaptive Response to Ischaemic Preconditioning in Young Men

OBJECTIVES: The proposal of this study was to evaluate the effect of acute and ten-day ischaemic preconditioning (IPC) training procedure on the Wingate Anaerobic Test (WAnT), the ferritin H (FTH), ferritin L (FTL), and transferrin receptor 1 (TFRC) mRNA expression in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC), and anaerobic performance. METHOD: 34 healthy men volunteers (aged 20.7 ± 1.22 years) participated in the study. The effects of bilateral upper limb IPC and sham controlled condition were assessed in two experimental protocols: (a) the influence of acute (one time) IPC based on an experimental crossover study design and (b) the influence of ten-day IPC training treatment based on a random group assignment. At the beginning and at the end of each experiment upper body WAnT was performed and blood samples were collected to assess gene expression via quantitative PCR (qPCR). RESULTS: No significant effect of one-time ischaemic preconditioning procedure was observed on upper body WAnT performance. Ten-day IPC training significantly increased upper limbs relative mean power (from 5.29 ± 0.50 to 5.79 ± 0.70 (W/kg), p < 0.05). One-time IPC caused significant decrease in FTH, FTL, and TFRC mRNA levels while 10 days of IPC resulted in significant increase of FTH and FTL mRNA (from 2 (∧)254.2 to 2 (∧)1678.6 (p = 0.01) for FTH and 2 (∧)81.5 to 2 (∧)923 (p = 0.01) for FTL) and decrease in TFRC mRNA. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that ten-day IPC training intervention significantly affects upper limb relative peak power. The observed overexpression of FTH and FTL genes could be associated with adaptation response induced by prolonged IPC.