APOE and Sex Impacts Functional Recovery after Cervical Spinal Cord Injury

Genetic factors are key to understanding recovery following spinal cord injury (SCI). Prior work conducted in our laboratory demonstrated that APOE genotype impacts respiratory plasticity after cervical SCI. Specifically, female mice expressing the APOE4 allele had impairments in their ability to generate and maintain robust diaphragmatic activity following cervical SCI and intermittent hypoxia treatment relative to APOE3 counterparts. Subsequently we showed that different APOE alleles leads to altered neural respiratory control even without a spinal cord injury and that the effect is sex dependent. To extend these findings, we are now investigating the impact of APOE genotype and sex on locomotor and respiratory motor recovery in a humanized APOE knock-in mouse model homozygous for either the APOE3 and E4 alleles. Further, we examined how genotype and sex effected plasticity and serotonin levels below the lesion. We hypothesized that animals with the APOE4 allele will demonstrate impaired recovery following SCI across all measures. We performed a left C2 hemisection injury on male and female mice of both APOE3 and APOE4 genotype (n = 8/group). We recorded whole body plethysmography and CatWalk gait analysis weekly beginning at pre-injury through three weeks post injury. Consistent with our previous findings male APOE3 mice responded better than APOE4 counterparts during respiratory challenge even following SCI. Specifically APOE3 male mice showed greater improvements in respiratory rate during both normoxia and hypoxia challenge at early timepoints following injury. Interestingly during catwalk gait analysis APOE4 male mice recovered function faster than APOE3 counterparts in the weeks following SCI. This work is critical because it lays the foundation for understanding how diverse genotypes in the clinical SCI population may indicate the need to personalize treatment for individuals following injury. AG065220 AG060056 Nielsen Foundation. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.