Exercise intensity and sex alter neurometabolic, transcriptional, and functional recovery following traumatic brain injury.

In order to assess the impact of treadmill exercise on traumatic brain injury outcomes, we subjected male and female swiss webster mice to a controlled cortical impact (CCI), followed by 10 days of sedentary, low-, moderate-, or high-intensity treadmill exercise. Outcome measures included neurometabolic function, cognitive recovery, oxidative stress, pathophysiology, and single nuclei RNA sequencing (snRNA seq). The snRNA seq study was conducted on both male and female mice, and included a total of 2 replicates (each was a pool of 2 tissue samples) from each of the following groups: male sham sedentary, male CCI sedentary, male CCI low, male CCI high, female sham sedentary, female CCI sedentary, female CCI low, female CCI high. Our data reveal exercise intensity- and sex-dependent effects of treadmill exercise following injury. Transcriptomic changes were largely limited to the low-intensity exercised CCI males. Overall design: A 3mm perilesional coronal brain section was dissected from the ipsilateral hemisphere, and a block containing hippocampal and cortical tissue was then further dissected from that section. Single nuclei RNA sequencing was performed on a NextSeq 2000.