Shiva Mansouri, Vladimer Darsalia, Mohamed Eweida, Mathias Lundberg, David Nathanson and Cesare Patrone
Type 2 diabetic and obese patients are under high risk to prematurely develop neurological complications such as stroke and Alzheimer’s disease. Interestingly, type 2-diabetes impairs adult neurogenesis in rodent animal models and this impairment has been suggested to play a role in the brain complications of this disease. Recent work from us and others showed that the treatment with the Glucagon-Like Peptide 1 Receptor (GLP-1R) agonist Exendin-4 stimulates adult neurogenesis in rodents.
Based on these findings we have raised the hypothesis that Exendin-4 may counteract the detrimental effects induced by diabetes in neural stem/progenitor cells. The aim of this study was to investigate whether Exendin-4 protect neural progenitor cells from glucolipotoxicity and to analyse if the regulation of apoptosis may be involved in the Exendin-4 protecting effect. Murine neural progenitor cells were exposed to high palmitate and glucose, which characterize diabetic glucolipotoxicity, in presence/absence of Exendin-4. To determine whether neural progenitor cells proliferation was impacted by the Exendin-4 treatment, [3H] thymidine incorporation experiments were also performed. The expression of apoptosis key players, such as cleaved-caspase 3 and Bcl-2, were evaluated by western blotting. We show that Exendin-4 counteracts the impaired neural progenitor cell viability induced by glucolipotoxicity.
Cell proliferation was not influenced by the Exendin-4 treatment. The protective effect induced by Exendin-4 correlated with decreased apoptosis. In addition, the Exendin-4 protective effect was completely abolished by using the GLP- 1R antagonist Ex-9-39, indicating that the protective effect by Exendin-4 was GLP-1R-mediated. In conclusion, we show a direct survival effect of GLP-1R activation on neural progenitor cells challenged by diabetic-like conditions. The results support a potential therapeutic role of GLP-1R agonists, based on neurogenesis stimulation, for the treatment of the neurological complications in Type 2-diabetes and obesity.