Everyone responds to exercise differently. Now, researchers are reporting an advance toward a blood test that can help predict an individual’s best exercise choice for optimizing cardiorespiratory fitness, which refers to how well your heart, lung, and muscles work together during exercise.
For the study, researchers analyzed the molecular composition of people’s blood to see how it might be related to physiological changes related to exercise. They studied data from 654 men and women who participated in the HERITAGE Family Study, which looks at changes in exercise and health in parents and their offspring. They measured as many as 5,000 proteins before and after a 20-week exercise program.
The researchers identified 147 proteins that that were associated with people’s baseline cardiorespiratory fitness at the start of the study. In addition, they also identified 102 proteins that indicated a person’s physical response to exercise. The researchers used this data to develop a protein score that improved their ability to predict an individual’s responsiveness to an exercise training protocol, including the ability to identify those who are least likely to improve.
When compared to a separate population-based study, some of the proteins identified were also linked to an elevated risk of early death, highlighting the link between cardiorespiratory fitness and long-term health outcomes, the researchers said.
The researchers caution that more studies are needed before molecular profiling tools are used to custom-design exercise programs. Their study, published in Nature Metabolism, was partly funded by the NHLBI.