Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 8|pp 7066—7111

Cutaneous wound healing in aged, high fat diet-induced obese female or male C57BL/6 mice

Marta Kopcewicz¹, Katarzyna Walendzik¹, Joanna Bukowska¹, Anna Kur-Piotrowska¹, Sylwia Machcinska¹, Jeffrey M. Gimble^2,^3,⁴, Barbara Gawronska-Kozak¹

¹Institute of Animal Reproduction and Food Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Olsztyn, Poland
²LaCell LLC, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA
³Obatala Sciences Inc., New Orleans, LA 70148, USA
⁴Departments of Medicine, Structural and Cellular Biology, and Surgery and Center for Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine, Tulane University School of Medicine, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA

Received: October 22, 2019Accepted: February 25, 2020Published: April 15, 2020

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103064

Copyright © 2020 Kopcewicz et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Since there are limited studies analyzing the impact of age, sex and obesity on cutaneous repair, the current study evaluated excisional skin wound healing as a function of age, sex and diet in C57BL/6 mice subjected to either low (LFD) or high (HFD) fat diet. Older mice accumulated increased body fat relative to younger mice under HFD. Skin wound healing at particular stages was affected by age in the aspect of Tgfβ-1, MCP-1, Mmp-9 and Mmp-13 expression. The most profound, cumulative effect was observed for the combination of two parameters: age and sex. While skin of younger males displayed extremely high collagen 1 and collagen 3 expression, younger females showed exceptionally high Mmp-13 expression at day 3 and 7 after injury. Diet as a single variable modified the thickness of dermis due to increased dermal White Adipose Tissue (dWAT) accumulation in mice fed HFD. The combination of age and diet affected the re-epithelialization and inflammatory response of injured skin. Overall, our data indicate that age has the most fundamental impact although all components (age, sex and diet) contribute to skin repair.