EFEITOS DO EXERCíCIO FíSICO SOBRE O SISTEMA IMUNE DE MULHERES PóS-MENOPAUSADAS: REVIS?O SISTEMáTICA

摘要

Menopausal women undergo endocrine changes that cause multiple disorders, including attenuation of the immune response. In this sense, a systematic review of the literature was conducted aiming to find randomized controlled trials (RCTs) which had studied the effect of physical exercise on immune modulation in postmenopausal women. Electronic databases of Medline/PubMed, SciELO, Scopus, Lilacs, and Bireme were used with the following keywords: humans, immune system, physical activity, exercise, physical fitness, postmenopause and postmenopausal period. The exclusion criteria for titles and abstracts were any article that clearly did not address the effect of exercise/physical activity on the immune system and those that investigated women with cancer and/or diabetes. Seven articles were included for analysis. Interventions lasted from six months to 19.9 years, with samples ranging from 18 to 421 subjects. All studies used moderate aerobic exercise as intervention. Only one study used subjective measure to evaluate the immune system and the remaining studies used direct biochemical measurements. Regarding the effect of exercise on immune modulation, 57.1% of the RCT concluded that physical exercise acted positively on immune system of menopausal women and showed no negative effect. C-reactive protein and immune cell count were the most researched variables, with four studies each, where only one in each variable was significantly associated with decrease in these parameters. Three studies investigated the variable interleukin-6 and two investigated the serum amyloid A, showing no significant association; of the two studies evaluating immunoglobulins, only one showed an association with increased immunoglobulin A. We concluded that it is no likely that aerobic exercise impairs the immune system in postmenopausal women, and is necessary to perform new RCTs to study the changes in immune modulation in this population and to address different volumes and types of exercise.