The Role of the Innate and Adaptive Immunity in Exercise Induced Muscle Damage and Repair

The immune system plays a crucial role in regulating tissue repair processes following damage. The cellular basis of tissue repair has best been studied in toxin-induced models due to their reliability and reproducible kinetics. These models have established a crucial role for innate and adaptive immune cells that follow a temporally regulated response that begins with a proinflammatory response that is subsequently replaced by a regulatory type 2 immune response to facilitate tissue repair and restore homeostasis. Inflammation is a crucial first response to cell damage that is modulated by the response of innate lymphoid cells and tissue resident regulatory T cells. In this review we examine the process of exercise induced muscle damage to provide comparisons of how this may follow a similar coordinated response as that mediated by toxin induced damage.