Obesity is profoundly involved in cardiovascular diseases. On the other hand, aerobic exercise training (EXT) attenuates obesity and promotes cardiac benefits in obese individuals. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate if obesity alters the cardiac function and whether its association with exercise training can improve cardiac function in an obese Zucker rat strain. The rats were divided in the following groups: Lean Zucker rats (LZR); lean Zucker rats plus exercise training (LZR+EXT); obese Zucker rat (OZR) and obese Zucker rat plus exercise training (OZR+EXT). EXT consisted of 10 weeks swimming sessions of 60 min, 5 days/week. At the end of the training protocol we evaluated heart rate (HR), systolic blood pressure (SBP), cardiac hypertrophy (CH) and function. The trained groups LZR+EXT and OZR+EXT showed a 12% lower resting HR when compared with theirs respective controls. In addition, our results showed that exercise training reduced the cardiac mass by 13% and improved the diastolic function by 43% in the obese trained group when compared with the obese untrained. In conclusion, aerobic exercise training reverts the cardiac injuries in obese Zucker rats.
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