The Effect of Resistance Training on Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF) in Older Women

Objectives Vascular endothelial cells play an important role in the regulation of vascular vessels with active substances, such as vascular endothelial growth factor are responsible. The present study tried to investigate the effect of resistance training on the density of old women's endothelial growth factor. Methods & Materials Twenty-four postmenopausal women (age Mean +/- SD=67.37 +/- 6.02, height=153.02 +/- 8.12, weight=65.78 +/- 12.03, BMI=26.87 +/- 4.16, fat=18.61 +/- 3.65, and WHR=0.92 +/- 0.4) were purposefully chosen and randomly divided into control and experimental groups. Each group consisted of 12 women. Experimental group did resistance training for eight weeks as follows: three sessions per week with 40% to 65% intensity of a maximum repetition and 5% overload after each 6 sessions. Before and after 8 weeks of training, resting levels of vascular endothelial growth factor's density was measured and recorded. The normality of the data was determined by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Paired samples t test was run for within group variations and independent samples t test was run for between groups' variations. The significant level was lower than 0.05. Results average and standard deviation of before and after eight weeks concentration of tour vascular endothelial growth inn control group was respectively 26.61 +/- 3.62, 25.72 +/- 2.88 and also in experimental group was 23.81 +/- 2.18, 26.48 +/- 4.48, 23.81 +/- 2.18 respectively; therefore the mean differences of vascular endothelial growth factor was significant in pretest and posttest of experimental group (P=0.015) while it wasn't significant in control group P=0.862. Conclusion The results showed the significant effect of resistance training on the reduction of the density of vascular endothelial growth factor of the old women's plasma (P=0.019).