Improvement of Vascular Endothelial Function at an Early Stage by the Original Stretching Exercise Designed in Our Study Group in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Background and Aims: Vascular endothelial cells play an important role in protecting and repairing vessels. It is little known that exercise therapy could ameliorate the vascular endothelial function in diabetic patients. In 2015, in collaboration with Tobu Sports Ltd. (Japan), we created the original exercise program including 12 kinds of body-stretching and converted the program to a DVD. The main aim in the present study is whether the exercise therapy using our original DVD would improve the vascular endothelial function in type 2 diabetic patients. Subjects and Methods: Ten patients with type 2 diabetic mellitus (M/F: 8/2, Age: 58.2±12.7 years) strictly performed the exercise program using the DVD for 12 weeks. Vascular endothelial function was estimated as a reactive hyperemia index (RHI) measured with Endo PAT (Nihon-Koden Ltd. Japan). Body compositions in patients were measured with MC-780 (Tanita Ltd. Japan). We evaluated CAVI or ABI as marker of arteriosclerosis. Various biomedical parameters were assayed in the study. Results: There was a significant increase in RHI before and after intervention (initiation: 1.63±0.3, after: 2.02±0.5, p Conclusions: The present study suggests that the intervention of exercise composed by various stretching actions could lead to improvement of vascular endothelial function at an early stage, different from alterations of other metabolic markers in diabetic patients. Thereby, we speculate that vascular endothelial function might be relatively sensitive against a stretching-exercise. Disclosure K. Hara: None. H. Shinozaki: None. M. Yamauchi: None. R. Naruse: None. M. Suetsugu: None. T. Tsuchiya: None. K. Takebayashi: None. T. Inukai: None.