Males get acute kidney damage – the place kidney efficiency all of a sudden declines – at the next fee than ladies. An experiment with mice means that this could possibly be associated to having larger ranges of testosterone
Well being
8 November 2022
Acute kidney damage causes a sudden decline in kidney perform Shutterstock/Peakstock
Low testosterone ranges seem to guard kidney cells in mice from cell dying. The discovering may clarify why ladies are at a decrease danger of acute kidney damage than males.
Tomokazu Souma at Duke College in North Carolina collected kidney samples from eight mice – 4 females and 4 males – and genetically sequenced them. They recognized 128 genes that had been expressed in a different way between the 2 sexes and additional evaluation revealed many of those genes had been associated to a selected cell course of known as NRF2. This course of is thought to guard in opposition to ferroptosis, a type of cell dying that could be a driver of acute kidney damage in folks, the place the kidneys all of a sudden decline in efficiency.
To attempt to work out whether or not intercourse hormones have an effect on the safety offered by NRF2, the crew, in a separate experiment, eliminated the ovaries of six feminine mice and the testicles of 4 male mice in order that the mice would have much less oestrogen and fewer testosterone respectively than regular.
They sequenced the animals’ genes three to 4 weeks later and located that, within the feminine mice, the genes concerned in NRF2 weren’t affected by the process. However for the male mice, there was over a fivefold improve, on common, within the expression of two of the genes – GSTA4 and CBR1 – compared with mice with testicles.
This means that testosterone reduces the NRF2 course of in male mice, leaving them extra vulnerable to ferroptosis of their kidneys and probably explaining why males have larger incidences of kidney damage, says Souma.
Oestrogen should play a task within the intercourse variations for kidney illness, nevertheless. One other experiment from the crew discovered that feminine mice with out ovaries had worse kidney perform than people who did.
“There are a lot of totally different mechanisms which were explored with respect to intercourse variations in acute kidney damage, they usually all appear believable,” says Joel Neugarten at Montefiore Medical Middle in New York. “And it’s most likely a mix of various elements that specify the distinction.”
Journal reference: Cell Stories, DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2022.111610
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