Body weight supported treadmill training on nerve cells differentiation after stem cells transplantation in rats of spinal cord injury / 中华物理医学与康复杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To investigate the effect of bone marrow stem cells (BMSCs) transplantation combined with body weight supported treadmill training on neural functional recovery of rats with spinal cord injury.Methods T11 complete spinal cord injury (SCI) was introduced into 40 Sprague-Dawley male rats using an improved simple device,imitating the Allen method.The rats were randomly divided into a stem cell transplantation group,a body weight support treadmill training group,a combined treatment group and a control group,each of 10 assigned according to a random number table.One week after the SCI operation,stem cell transplantation was performed on the rats in the stem cell transplantation group and the combined treatment group.One day before their transplantation,the third passage BMSCs were labeled with 5-ethynyl-2'-deoxyuridine (Edu).The rats in body weight support treadmill training group and combined treatment group were received body weight support treadmill training,while the other two groups were not given any training.At the 1 st,2nd,3rd,4th and 5th week after SCI modeling,Basso-Beattie-Bresnahan (BBB) movement function score was used to evaluate the motor function recovery of all rats.At the 5 th week after SCI,immunohistochemical staining and immunofluorescence staining was applied to detect neural specific markers including the neuron specific enolase (NSE),microtubule associated protein (MAP-1 β) and vimentin (VIM).The survival and differentiation of the transplanted cells,as well as the nerve fiber recovery in the lesion were also observed.Results The average BBB score of the combined treatment group was (6.60 ± 0.97) at the 2nd week after SCI operation,significantly higher than the other 3 groups,while that of the stem cell transplantation group and the body weight support treadmill training group was (5.00 ± 0.67) and (4.80 ± 0.63) respectively,both higher than that of the control group but without significant differences (P ＞ 0.05).In the third week after modeling,however,the value of the stem cell transplantation group rose to (8.00 ± 0.67),significantly higher than that of the body weight support treadmill training group (6.80 ± 0.79).The immuohistochemical staining showed that a variable degree of neural specific markers (NSE,MAP-1 β,VIM) positive cells were observed in the SCI tissues of all groups,with those in the combined treatment group significantly higher than the other 3 groups.The immunofluorescence also found significantly higher fluorescence expression of neural specific protein markers including NSE,MAP-1 βand VIM in the combined treatment group than the rest group,with obvious proliferation and differentiation of nerve fibers.Conclusions Stem cell transplantation combined with partial body weight supported treadmill training can effectively promote the recovery of neural function of rats with spinal cord injury,and the effect is better than solely stem cell transplantation or the weight loss training.