Studying Sex as a Biological Variable: Considerations of weight, anemia and mortality following thoracic spinal cord contusion injury in male and female mice

DOI:10.34945/F5D01P

DATASET CITATION

Stewart A. N., MacLean S. M., Stromberg A. J., Whelan J. P., Bailey W. M., Wilson M. E., Gensel J. C. (2021) Studying Sex as a Biological Variable: Considerations of weight, anemia and mortality following thoracic spinal cord contusion injury in male and female mice. ODC-SCI:652 http://doi.org/10.34945/F5D01P

ABSTRACT

STUDY PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to examine functional recovery, morbidity, mortality, etc. as a function of both sex and age in C57Bl/6J mice after thoracic contusion SCI (T9, 60kdyn, IH). Experimental groups consist of young and middle-aged mice (4 or 14 months old at the time of injury) of both sexes, male or female, that underwent contusion or sham injury. The data in this collection and a thorough interpretation of the data was published in manuscript form in Stewart et al., 2020 PMIDs: 32849242; 33193066: Considerations for Studying Sex as a Biological Variable in Spinal Cord Injury. Stewart AN, MacLean SM, Stromberg AJ, Whelan JP, Bailey WM, Gensel JC, Wilson ME. Front Neurol. 2020 Aug 5;11:802. doi:10.3389/fneur.2020.00802. eCollection 2020.

DATA COLLECTED: Collectively, data from 8 experimental groups: sex (2) x age (2) x injury (2). Sample sizes range from 5-10 depending upon the outcome measure and time of sacrifice. Data for this study include weights after injury, overall mortality, injury-induced anemia as determined by red blood cell ratios in plasma (28 days post injury), estrous cycle information for females (weekly for 4 weeks) along with endpoint (28 days) plasma estradiol levels, as well as, BMS scores at 1 and 28 days after injury. The data presented is a comprehensive collector of data collected over several years across different experiments utilizing both male and female mice. For this reason, not all outcomes were collected for all subjects (missing or NA is used to indicate data not collected). Not all studies used the same outcome measures (i.e. BMS) so not all outcomes were collected for each subject.

CONCLUSIONS: The data presented in this dataset show that sex contributes to a variety of factors after SCI including weight loss, anemia, and mortality. Further, age potentiates sex-dependent effects. Sex-specific accommodations, i.e. single housing, likely also impact SCI recovery. A corrigendum for the original manuscript was published to correct for some miscoded data, this data set reflects the corrected data as published in the corrigendum. Through our analyses, we identify several potential confounds that should be considered in a study design incorporating both sexes including differences in anatomy, behavior, housing, and drug metabolism. Ultimately, our ability to consider sex as a biological variable in the study of SCI will depend upon open and rigorous data reporting and interpretation.

KEYWORDS

PROVENANCE / ORIGINATING PUBLICATIONS

• Stewart AN, MacLean SM, Stromberg AJ, Whelan JP, Bailey WM, Gensel JC, Wilson ME. Considerations for Studying Sex as a Biological Variable in Spinal Cord Injury. Front Neurol. 2020 Aug 5;11:802. DOI:10.3389/fneur.2020.00802. Erratum in: Front Neurol. 2020 Oct 20;11:597689. PMID: 32849242; PMCID: PMC7419700.

• Stewart AN, MacLean SM, Stromberg AJ, Whelan JP, Bailey WM, Gensel JC, Wilson ME. Corrigendum: Considerations for Studying Sex as a Biological Variable in Spinal Cord Injury. Front Neurol. 2020 Oct 20;11:597689. DOI:10.3389/fneur.2020.597689. Erratum for: Front Neurol. 2020 Aug 05;11:802. PMID: 33193066; PMCID: PMC7606993.

NOTES

DATASET INFO

Contact: Stewart Andrew (andrew.n.stewart@uky.edu), Gensel John (gensel.1@uky.edu)

Lab: Gensel Lab (Nero)

ODC-SCI Accession:652

Records in Dataset: 91

Fields per Record: 45

Last updated: 2021-11-23 (See changelog)

Date published: 2021-11-22

Downloads: 28

Files: 2

LICENSE

Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0)

FUNDING AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NIH grants R01NS091582 and F32NS111241

CONTRIBUTORS

Stewart, Andrew N. [ORCID:0000-0003-0607-6578]

University of Kentucky

MacLean, Steven M.

University of Kentucky

Stromberg, Arnold J. [ORCID:0000-0003-0336-9789]

University of Kentucky

Whelan, Jessica P.

University of Kentucky

Bailey, William M. [ORCID:0000-0003-2640-4874]

University of Kentucky

Wilson, Melinda E. [ORCID:0000-0003-2622-3555]

University of Kentucky

Gensel, John C. [ORCID:0000-0001-8980-108X]

University of Kentucky