Abstract
High-cervical spinal cord injury often disrupts respiratory motor pathways and disables breathing in the affected population. Moreover, cervically injured individuals are at risk for developing acute lung injury, which predicts substantial mortality rates. While the correlation between acute lung injury and spinal cord injury has been found in the clinical setting, the field lacks an animal model to interrogate the fundamental biology of this relationship. To begin to address this gap in knowledge, we performed an experimental cervical spinal cord injury (N = 18) alongside sham injury (N = 3) and naïve animals (N = 15) to assess lung injury in adult rats. We demonstrate that animals display some early signs of lung injury two weeks post-spinal cord injury. While no obvious histological signs of injury were observed, the spinal cord injured cohort displayed significant signs of metabolic dysregulation in multiple pathways that include amino acid metabolism, lipid metabolism, and N-linked glycosylation. Collectively, we establish for the first time a model of lung injury after spinal cord injury at an acute time point that can be used to monitor the progression of lung damage, as well as identify potential targets to ameliorate acute lung injury.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-2023
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcad091
Funding Information
This publication was financially supported by National Institute of Health R01 NS101105 (WJA). National Institute of Health R01 HL131526 (CMW), National Institute of Health R01 HL151419 (CMW), National Institute of Health R01 AG066653 (RCS), National Institute of Health R35 NS116824 (MSG), National Institute of Health P01 NS097197 (MSG), and National Institute of Health R21 NS121966-01 (WJA). This publication was supported by the National Center for Research Resources and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health, through Grant UL1TR001998. The con- tent is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. Research reported in this publication was supported by an Institutional Development Award (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under grant number P20GM103527. Research reported in this publication was supported by the Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Research Center Chair Endowment #8.
Repository Citation
Huffman, Emily E.; Dong, Brittany E.; Clarke, Harrison A.; Young, Lyndsay E. A.; Gentry, Matthew S.; Allison, Derek B.; Sun, Ramon C.; Waters, Christopher M.; and Alilain, Warren J., "Cervical spinal cord injury leads to injury and altered metabolism in the lungs" (2023). Saha Cardiovascular Research Center Faculty Publications. 75.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cvrc_facpub/75
Included in
Cardiology Commons, Circulatory and Respiratory Physiology Commons, Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience Commons, Neurology Commons, Other Psychiatry and Psychology Commons
Notes/Citation Information
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.