Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 5 pp 6765—6781
Growth hormone ameliorates the age-associated depletion of ovarian reserve and decline of oocyte quality via inhibiting the activation of Fos and Jun signaling
- 1 Reproductive Medicine Center, The Affiliated Drum Tower Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School, Nanjing 210008, People’s Republic of China
- 2 Center for Clinical Stem Cell Reasearch, The Affiliated Drum Tower Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School, Nanjing 210008, People’s Republic of China
Received: October 1, 2020 Accepted: December 12, 2020 Published: February 17, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202534How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Oocyte quality typically begins to decline with aging, which contributes to subfertility and infertility. However, there is still no effective treatment to restore the ovarian reserve and improve aged-oocyte quality. According to the present study, growth hormone (GH) secretion changes with maternal age in female mice. After intraperitoneal injection with GH (1 mg/kg body weight) every two days for two months, the 10-month-old mice showed a better ovarian reserve and oocyte quality than control mice. GH treatment decreased the occurrence rate of aneuploidy caused by spindle/chromosome defects. Additionally, the single oocyte transcriptome analysis indicated that GH decreased the expression of apoptosis-related genes in oocytes. It was also observed that GH treatment reduced the expression of γH2AX and apoptosis of aged oocytes via decreasing the activation of Fos and Jun. Collectively, our results indicate that GH treatment is an effective way to reverse the age-associated depletion of ovarian reserve and the decline of oocyte quality by decreasing apoptosis.