Massage Therapy Attenuates Inflammatory Signalling After Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage

Massage therapy is commonly used during physical rehabilitation of skeletal muscle to ameliorate pain and promote recovery from injury. Although there is evidence that massage may relieve pain in injured muscle, how massage affects cellular function remains unknown.

The discovery provides strong evidence that massage merits further study as a treatment for injuries and chronic disorders, said Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky, a researcher at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and lead author of a study about the research.

The authors administered either massage therapy or no treatment to separate quadriceps of 11 young male participants after exercise-induced muscle damage. Tarnopolsky, who has studied the cellular effects of exercise for decades, performed muscle biopsies in both quadriceps (vastus lateralis) of healthy young men before and after they’d undergone strenuous exercise, and then a third time after massaging just one leg in each individual. Comparing tissues from each subject’s massaged leg with tissues from his unmassaged leg, Tarnopolsky and his team found that massage therapy reduced exercise-related inflammation by dampening activity of a protein called NF-kB.

Massage also seemed to help cells recover by boosting amounts of another protein called PGC-1alpha, which spurs production of new mitochondria — tiny organelles inside cells that are crucial for muscle energy generation and adaptation to endurance exercise. Other proteins with similar roles were influenced by massage as well.

The study was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, was the first that drilled down to cellular basics. We knew there was something going on, but we couldn’t get to it a decade ago, because the technology to probe the smallest structures of the body didn’t yet exist.

Link to the paper here http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/119/119ra13