Androvic, P. et al. Cell Rep 31, 107777 (2020)

The risk of ischemic stroke increases as people age, but the debilitating and often deadly occurrence tends to be studied in young mouse models. Likely as a result, preclinical results seldom translate to the clinic. To explore the influence of aging on stroke, researchers from the Czech Republic added aged animals to their experiments.

Looking genome-wide with RNA sequencing, the researchers compared transcription data from the brains of young (3 month old) and aged (18 month old) female C57Bl/6 mice three days following middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO), a model of ischemic stroke, and from age-matched controls. Nothing appeared particularly protective in the young animals, but the researchers recorded differential expression of genes involved in inflammation and interferon signaling in the aged mice, as well as downregulation of axon & synapse maintenance genes following MCAO.