Estrogen, not intrinsic aging, is the major regulator of delayed human wound healing in the elderly.docVIP

Open Access Research 2008HardmanVolume 9,andIssuAshcrofte 5, Article R80 Estrogen, not intrinsic aging, is the major regulator of delayed human wound healing in the elderly Matthew J Hardman and Gillian S Ashcroft Address: Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PT, UK. Correspondence: Matthew J Hardman. Email: matthew.j.hardman@manchester.ac.uk. Gillian S Ashcroft. Email: gillian.s.ashcroft@manchester.ac.uk Published: 13 May 2008 Received: 4 April 2008 Revised: 7 April 2008 Accepted: 13 May 2008 Genome Biology 2008, 9:R80 (doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-5-r80) The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2008/9/5/R80 ? 2008 Hardman and Ashcroft; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ThethpanArolepnraelvofyisoiestrogenussolfygtehnoeuingehxwoundpt.re/spsionhealingin male elderly and young human wounds suggests that estrogen has a more profound influence on aging Abstract Background: Multiple processes have been implicated in age-related delayed healing, including altered gene expression, intrinsic cellular changes, and changes in extracellular milieu (including hormones). To date, little attempt has been made to assess the relative contribution of each of these processes to a human aging phenomenon. The objective of this study is to determine the contribution of estrogen versus aging in age-associated delayed human wound healing. Results: Using an Affymetrix microarray-based approach we show that the differences in gene expression between male elderly and young human wounds are almost exclusively estrogen regulated. Expression of 78 probe sets was significantly decreased and 10 probe sets incr