Exercise-induced Effects on Immune Parameters in Healthy Participants

Exercise has been shown to influence the immune system and, for example, improve anti-viral immune response. However, knowledge of how exercise impacts the immune system is still lacking. Therefore, the goal of this clinical study is to perform a comprehensive multi-parameter analysis of immunological parameters in healthy participants before and after one bout of high-intensity aerobic exercise. The primary endpoint of this study is to determine the exercise-induced changes of anti-viral T cell immunity in peripheral blood against common and recurrent viruses. Up to 70 healthy participants in the age between 18 and 75 will be recruited. The first visit will be for prescreening the health status, answering questionnaires and providing a capillary blood sample for HLA screening. HLA-A2 positive participants will continue on the trial with a VO2 max test for Visit 2 and the supervised aerobic medium- to high-intensity (90% VO2 max) exercise session for Visit 3. Peripheral blood samples will be taken pre-exercise, within 2 minutes post-exercise and 60 minutes post-exercise. These findings may pave the way to define serum markers or cellular immunological traits that provide new insight into how exercise promotes powerful and sustained cellular immune responses.