Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 5|pp 6765—6781

Growth hormone ameliorates the age-associated depletion of ovarian reserve and decline of oocyte quality via inhibiting the activation of Fos and Jun signaling

Chuanming Liu¹, Shiyuan Li¹, Yifan Li¹, Jiao Tian¹, Xiaoling Sun¹, Tianran Song¹, Guijun Yan¹, Lijun Ding^1,², Haixiang Sun¹

¹Reproductive Medicine Center, The Affiliated Drum Tower Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School, Nanjing 210008, People’s Republic of China
²Center for Clinical Stem Cell Reasearch, The Affiliated Drum Tower Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School, Nanjing 210008, People’s Republic of China

* Equal contribution

Received: October 1, 2020Accepted: December 12, 2020Published: February 17, 2021

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202534

Copyright: © 2021 Liu 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

Oocyte quality typically begins to decline with aging, which contributes to subfertility and infertility. However, there is still no effective treatment to restore the ovarian reserve and improve aged-oocyte quality. According to the present study, growth hormone (GH) secretion changes with maternal age in female mice. After intraperitoneal injection with GH (1 mg/kg body weight) every two days for two months, the 10-month-old mice showed a better ovarian reserve and oocyte quality than control mice. GH treatment decreased the occurrence rate of aneuploidy caused by spindle/chromosome defects. Additionally, the single oocyte transcriptome analysis indicated that GH decreased the expression of apoptosis-related genes in oocytes. It was also observed that GH treatment reduced the expression of γH2AX and apoptosis of aged oocytes via decreasing the activation of Fos and Jun. Collectively, our results indicate that GH treatment is an effective way to reverse the age-associated depletion of ovarian reserve and the decline of oocyte quality by decreasing apoptosis.