Chronic Intermittent Hypoxia Exerts CNS Region-Specific Effects on Rat Microglial Inflammatory and TLR4 Gene Expression

Intermittent hypoxia (IH) during sleep is a hallmark of sleep apnea, causing significant neuronal apoptosis, and cognitive and behavioral deficits in CNS regions underlying memory processing and executive functions. IH-induced neuroinflammation is thought to contribute to cognitive deficits after IH. In the present studies, we tested the hypothesis that IH would differentially induce inflammatory factor gene expression in microglia in a CNS region-dependent manner, and that the effects of IH would differ temporally. To test this hypothesis, adult rats were exposed to intermittent hypoxia (2 min intervals of 10.5% O2) for 8 hours/day during their respective sleep cycles for 1, 3 or 14 days. Cortex, medulla and spinal cord tissues were dissected, microglia were immunomagnetically isolated and mRNA levels of the inflammatory genes iNOS, COX-2, TNFα, IL-1β and IL-6 and the innate immune receptor TLR4 were compared to levels in normoxia. Inflammatory gene expression was also assessed in tissue homogenates (containing all CNS cells). We found that microglia from different CNS regions responded to IH differently. Cortical microglia had longer lasting inflammatory gene expression whereas spinal microglial gene expression was rapid and transient. We also observed that inflammatory gene expression in microglia frequently differed from that in tissue homogenates from the same region, indicating that cells other than microglia also contribute to IH-induced neuroinflammation. Lastly, microglial TLR4 mRNA levels were strongly upregulated by IH in a region- and time-dependent manner, and the increase in TLR4 expression appeared to coincide with timing of peak inflammatory gene expression, suggesting that TLR4 may play a role in IH-induced neuroinflammation. Together, these data indicate that microglial-specific neuroinflammation may play distinct roles in the effects of intermittent hypoxia in different CNS regions.