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
- 1 Institute of Animal Reproduction and Food Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Olsztyn, Poland
- 2 LaCell LLC, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA
- 3 Obatala Sciences Inc., New Orleans, LA 70148, USA
- 4 Departments 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, 2019 Accepted: February 25, 2020 Published: April 15, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103064How to Cite
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.