BACKGROUND: Muscle aging is closely related to various epigenetic changes, and exercise has a certain regulatory effect on these epigenetic changes. However, the specific mechanism is not fully understood.
OBJECTIVE: To review the epigenetic mechanisms of skeletal muscle and how exercise can improve skeletal muscle aging and promote adaptive changes in muscle through these epigenetic mechanisms, aiming to provide a more comprehensive understanding of skeletal muscle aging and disease mechanisms.
METHODS: During the period from June 1st to August 1st, 2023, literature searches were conducted for relevant literature published from database inception to August 2023 in databases including Web of Science, PubMed, CNKI, WanFang, and VIP. The search terms used included “skeletal muscle,” “muscle,” “aging,” “older adult,” “aging,” “exercise,” “physical exercise,” “epigenetic,” and “epigenetics” in Chinese as well as “skeletal muscle, muscle, aging, older adult, senescence, age, exercise, sports, physical activity, epigenetic, epigenetics” in English. Boolean logic operators were used to connect the search terms for retrieval, and corresponding strategies were developed. According to the predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria, 70 eligible articles were selected.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Epigenetics refers to the phenomenon where gene expression and function are regulated without changes in gene sequence, and epigenetic changes in skeletal muscle are an important field. The epigenetic mechanisms of skeletal muscle play an important role in muscle aging, mainly involving DNA methylation, histone modification, regulation of non-coding RNAs, chromatin remodeling, changes in mitochondrial function and expression changes of aging-related genes. Exercise significantly regulates the epigenetics of skeletal muscle, including promoting DNA methylation, muscle histone modification, regulating miRNA expression, and regulating lncRNA expression, regulating muscle factors (such as interleukin-6), regulating mitochondrial function (such as peroxisome proliferators-activated receptors γ co-activator 1α). Future studies are recommended for long-term, cross-diverse population-based exercise interventions; the application of multi-omics techniques such as proteomics and metabolomics; strengthening the understanding of epigenetic changes at the single-cell level; cross-species comparative studies as well as human clinical trials for the translation of animal model findings to humans; strategies for combining exercise and pharmacological interventions to assess their synergistic effects; and epigenetic studies of crosstalk interactions between skeletal muscle and different organs.