Meeting Abstract

P2.182  Saturday, Jan. 5  Influence of Ethanol Ingestion on Overload-induced Muscular Hypertrophy in the Rat BRIM, D.L.*; TADROS, A.K.; TOMLINSON, V.E.; KENNETT, K.M.; BLANK, J.M.; California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo douglas_brim@cuesta.edu

Ethanol consumption is known to cause muscle atrophy in humans and rodent models. Numerous studies have characterized the changes in skeletal muscle associated with chronic ethanol ingestion and identified signaling pathways related to intracellular protein synthesis that are inhibited by acute ethanol consumption. However, these studies have been done primarily in sedentary animals. Since protein synthesis in muscle is increased by chronic resistance exercise, we performed an experiment assessing the interaction between ethanol consumption and resistance training in a hind limb muscle of the rat. We overloaded the right plantaris of male Sprague-Dawley rats (n=14) by surgical excision of the gastrocnemius and soleus. The animals were fed either an ethanol or maltodextrin containing liquid diet. After five weeks the plantaris was harvested from both the unaltered and overloaded legs and the muscle masses were compared. Surgical overload significantly increased plantaris mass (p<0.0001), and an ethanol diet tended to decrease plantaris mass (p=0.0697). In both the overloaded and unaltered legs, the mass of the plantaris was reduced by 12% in rats fed an ethanol containing diet. These results suggest that while ethanol does not prevent hypertrophy induced by chronic resistance exercise, the additive effects of ethanol and exercise are to diminish the hypertrophy induced by exercise. This work was sponsored by the Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research, under Award # N00014-11-1-359 to the California Central Coast Research Partnership (C3RP).