Effects of Diffuse Traumatic Brain Injury on Metrics of Inflammation, Growth, and Sleep in Male and Female Juvenile Rats
Year: 2024
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a devastating, biphasic disease process which newly affects millions of people across the world each year and continues to negatively impact hundreds of millions of previously injured individuals. Though a great deal of research has been conducted on the symptomology of adult injury, far less has been done examining how pediatric brain injury differs from adults in presentation, evolution, and responses to therapeutic intervention. In order for more effective treatments to be developed, more examination of the disease process in pre-pubertal models of TBI needs to be conducted. Here, we investigated biological sex differences in growth and growth hormone, immunological profiles, glial morphology, and sleep after a midline fluid percussion model of diffuse traumatic brain injury in juvenile Sprague-Dawley rats. We found no significant differences in body weights between sexes prior to TBI, but male rats subjected to TBI weighed less at 7 days post-injury (post-natal day 42) compared to uninjured male shams. A significant difference was observed between males and females in levels of IL-6, disregarding injury. Additionally, we observed a number of statistically significant and sex-specific effects on a number of sleep outcome measures including sleep bout duration, overall percent sleep at different time points post-injury, and total minutes slept. Our current findings suggest a modulatory role for gonadal hormones on several measures of injury response in both males and females that bears additional scrutiny. Histology and quantitative morphometric analyses on resident glial cells and recruited macrophages are ongoing.
Author: Ritterbusch, Dana Elizabeth
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Neurology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7154881276