The Effect of Continued Training with Crocin on Apoptosis Markers in Liver Tissue of High Fat Diet Induced Diabetic Rats Zahra Alimanesh 1 , Zeynab Alimanesh 1 , Fatemeh Davari 2 , Saeedeh Shadmehri 3 , Mozhgan Ahmadi 3 , Seyed Ali Hosseini 4 , Sepideh Dolati 5,* and Alemeh Hariri Far 6 1 Department of Nursing, Medical University of Yasouj, Yasouj, Iran 2 Department of Sport Physiology, Yasouj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Yasouj, Iran 3 Department of Physical Education and Sport Science, Yadegar-e-Imam Khomeini (RAH) Shahre-rey Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran 4 Department of Sport Physiology, Marvdasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marvdasht, Iran 5 Department of Nutrition, Ministry of Health and Medical Education, Tehran, Iran 6 Department of Community Nutrition, Faculty of Nutrition, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran à Corresponding Author: Sepideh Dolati. Email: sd.dolati@gmail.com Received: 13 May 2020; Accepted: 04 September 2020 Abstract: Diabetes mellitus (DM) disease can affect process of apoptosis by increasing oxidative stress, nevertheless exercise and crocin can improve apopto- sis; therefore present study aimed to investigate the effect of continued training with crocin on apoptosis markers in liver tissue of diabetic rats. In this experimen- tal study 32 diabetic rats based on fasting glucose divided into four groups of eight rats including: 1) sham, 2) training, 3) crocin, and 4) training with crocin also for investigate the effect of DM induction on apoptosis markers, eight healthy rats assigned in healthy control group. During eight weeks groups 2 and 4 ran 60 minutes on treadmill with intensity of 50–55% maximum speed for three ses- sions per week and groups 3 and 4 received 25 mg/kg/day crocin peritoneally. Shapiro–Wilk, one-way ANOVA with Tukey’ s post-hot tests were used for statis- tical analysis of data (P ≤ 0.05). DM induction significantly increased Bcl-2 as well as decreased Bax and P52 (P ≤ 0.05) nevertheless training and training with crocin significantly decreased Bcl-2 and increased Bax and P53 (P ≤ 0.05); crocin significantly decreased Bcl-2 and increased P53 (P ≤ 0.05) and training with cro- cin had higher effect on increase of Bax and P53 compare to training (P ≤ 0.05) also increase of Bax compare to crocin. Although training and crocin alone can improve apoptotic markers in diabetic rats, nevertheless training simultaneously with crocin have better effects than training alone. Keywords: Exercise; crocin; apoptosis; diabetes; tissue 1 Introduction The prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) has been on the rise in recent years. According to various studies, the global prevalence of DM will increase from 2.8% in 2000 to 4.4% by 2030. This growing trend will be 20% in industrialized countries and 69% in developing countries [1]; Also in the seventh This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics DOI:10.32604/mcb.2020.011532 Article ech T Press Science