Early-life stress elicits peripheral and brain immune activation differently in wild type and 5xFAD mice in a sex-specific manner.

BACKGROUND: The risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) is modulated by genetic and environmental factors. Early-life stress (ELS) exposure during critical periods of brain development can impact later brain function and health, including increasing the risk of developing AD. Microglial dysfunction and neuroinflammation have been implicated as playing a role in AD pathology and may be modulated by ELS. To complicate matters further, sex-specific effects have been noted in response to ELS and in the incidence and progression of AD. METHODS: Here, we subjected male and female mice with either a wild type or 5xFAD familial AD-model background to maternal separation (MS) from postnatal day 2 to 14 to induce ELS. RESULTS: We detected hippocampal neuroinflammatory alterations already at postnatal day 15. By 4 months of age, MS mice presented increased immobility time in the forced swim test and a lower discrimination index in the novel object recognition memory test compared to controls. We found altered Bdnf and Arc expression in the hippocampus and increased microglial activation in the prefrontal cortex due to MS in a sex-dependent manner. In 5xFAD mice specifically, MS exacerbated amyloid-beta deposition, particularly in females. In the periphery, the immune cell population was altered by MS exposure. CONCLUSION: Overall, our results demonstrate that MS has both short- and long-term effects on brain regions related to memory and on the inflammatory system, both in the brain and periphery. These ELS-related effects that are detectable even in adulthood may exacerbate pathology and increase the risk of developing AD via sex-specific mechanisms.

Hematopoietic stem cell ageing is uncoupled from p16 INK4A-mediated senescence.

Somatic stem cells are ultimately responsible for mediating appropriate organ homeostasis and have therefore been proposed to represent a cellular origin of the ageing process-a state often characterized by inappropriate homeostasis. Specifically, it has been suggested that ageing stem cells might succumb to replicative senescence by a mechanism involving the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p16(INK4A). Here, we tested multiple functional and molecular parameters indicative of p16(INK4A) activity in primary aged murine hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). We found no evidence that replicative senescence accompanies stem cell ageing in vivo, and in line with p16(INK4A) being a critical determinant of such processes, most aged HSCs (>99%) failed to express p16(INK4A) at the mRNA level. Moreover, whereas loss of epigenetically guided repression of the INK4A/ARF locus accompanied replicative senescent murine embryonic fibroblasts, such repression was maintained in aged stem cells. Taken together, these studies indicate that increased senescence as mediated by the p16(INK4A) tumor suppressor has only a minor function as an intrinsic regulator of steady-state HSC ageing in vivo.