Inflammatory biomarkers throughout influenza infection associate with changes in cardiovascular measurements

• Published in: Physiology (Bethesda, Md.) Vol. 38; no. S1
• Main Authors: Martin, Brigitte, Attipoe, Esinam, Wu, Wenji, Challagundla, Lavanya, Showmaker, Kurt, Garrett, Michael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.05.2023
• ISSN: 1548-9213; 1548-9221
• DOI: 10.1152/physiol.2023.38.S1.5730238

Abstract only For better infectious disease surveillance, there is growing interest in the detection of subtle changes in cardiovascular physiology in response to viral infection. This is not only important for earlier diagnosis and better prognosis of symptomatic carriers, but also useful to diagnose asymptomatic carriers of the virus. In our previous study, we found changes in cardiovascular physiology induced in A/Puerto Rico/8/34 (PR8) influenza infections in female and male C57BL/6J mice. Reduction in activity, blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) for females was observed approximately 3-13 days post infection (dpi) and males approximately 5-12 dpi. Additionally, we found sex differences in inflammatory maker expression in lungs at 7dpi with bulk RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data of lungs and Bio-plex cytokine assay for blood. In this study, we aim to associate changes in cardiovascular measurements with biomarkers throughout infection. Blood, brain, heart, lung, kidney, and nasal septum were collected at 1, 3, 5, and 9 dpi from influenza infected and naïve C57BL/6J female and male mice (n=6 for each time point and experimental group). Using body weight loss as a marker for disease in mice, we found both females and males had significant decrease in body weight at 9 dpi, yet infected females had a significant increase in brain, lung, and kidney weight at 9 dpi compared to naïve females. We are currently in process of analyzing pathological impacts of each tissue with histology and differing patterns of inflammatory maker expression in lungs throughout infection by analyzing bulk RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data of lungs and Bio-plex cytokine assay for blood. Both cardiovascular measurements and molecular markers throughout influenza infection help to distinguish sex differences caused by influenza virus infection for better, earlier disease diagnosis. Hypertension and Cardiorenal Diseases Research Training Program T32HL105324 (NIH) This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 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.