DNA damaged by sports?
Does anybody fancy sports? No? That’s no surprise at all. Nearly daily doping disclosures cast a damning light on high performance activities and their morbid background. Well, it seems that taking part in the Tour de France is unthinkable without bringing along suitcases full of EPO, hGH and Insulin. Actually, most of our healthy and thewy sports heroes are full of pretty insane drug cocktails.
This Wikipedia list is an interesting read on this topic. Please note: it’s a long, long list of doping cases (and it’s solely about cycling!!). You will have to scroll a while to reach the last cases from 2008.
From time to time, one of these guys kicks the bucket. These “sudden deaths” of healthy(?) young athletes more and more raised questions on the riskiness of sports in general (an appropriate entry is the out-dated Springer textbook “Performance enhancing drugs and sudden death – a case report and review of the literature”).
Well, is sport really life-threatening? Should even leisure athletes better avoid working up a sweat?
A recent study performed by Vienna-based nutritional scientists gives a surprising answer. Karl-Heinz Wagner and his colleagues investigated the effect of an Ironman triathlon on DNA stability. They measured the number of micronuclei, nucleoplasmic bridges and nuclear buds as biomarkers of genomic instability in lymphocytes of 20 male triathletes (before, within and after the race).
Wagner’s results were appeasing. Sport, even ultra-endurance exercises, does not cause long-lasting DNA damage in well-trained athletes. The paper’s abstract can be found here.
As their next project the scientists should investigate the correlation of illegal doping practices with the state of mind of doping swindlers. I suppose such a study would produce interesting results, too.
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Well, I have to say DNA damage is not the problem I was worried about when it came to excessive exercise. This article suggest that if it does not cause damage to the DNA structure it must not be harmful. HMM.