Muscle-Organ Crosstalk: The Emerging Roles of Myokines.
Level 5 - mechanism / opinion, no new human data
Narrative review synthesizing mechanisms of muscle-derived secretory factors without systematic review methodology
PubMed 32393961 · doi:10.1210/endrev/bnaa016
What was done
This is a narrative review describing skeletal muscle as an endocrine organ. The authors summarize research on exercise-induced myokine secretion and its autocrine, paracrine, and endocrine signaling pathways that mediate crosstalk between skeletal muscle and other organs including the brain, adipose tissue, bone, liver, gut, pancreas, vasculature, and skin.
What was found
The abstract reports no numerical data or quantitative effect sizes. It reports descriptively that skeletal muscle secretes hundreds of myokines in response to exercise that influence cognition, lipid and glucose metabolism, browning of white fat, bone formation, endothelial cell function, hypertrophy, skin structure, and tumor growth, while noting that only a few myokines have established specific functions in humans.
Why it matters
The paper synthesizes the biological mechanisms by which exercise confers multi-organ systemic benefits, proposing that myokines may serve as biomarkers for monitoring clinical exercise prescriptions in diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and neurodegenerative disorders.
Limits
This is a non-systematic narrative review providing a broad overview rather than primary clinical data or meta-analytic results. Specific functional roles in humans remain established for only a small subset of myokines, and the abstract reports no quantitative outcome measures or sample sizes.
Cited by
- supports Skeletal muscle acts as an endocrine organ that produces and secretes myokines and signaling molecules, including irisin, cathepsin D, BDNF, and interleukin-6.