Urinary Incontinence (UI) is a major cause of disability and lost autonomy in older individuals. Most incontinent elderly individuals exhibit involuntary bladder contractions, detrusor overactivity (DO). Ultrastructural studies of the overactive detrusor have revealed changes in contact between myocytes involving decreased numbers of adherens junctions, and the de novo appearance ofjunctions proposed to be aberrant gap junctions. Remarkably, former junctions has never been studied in bladder muscle cells, while, until recently, bladder muscle cells were felt not express gap junctions. We developed a primary culture system using rat bladder smooth muscle cells, and found that these formed typical N-cadherin positive junctions more typical of those formed between fibroblasts as opposed to epithelial cells. We also studied detrusor needle biopsies obtained from elderly subjects and discovered the presence of several known Connexin mRNA sequences in both individuals with DO and age-matched controls. In addition, we observed an apparent up regulation of connexin 43 mRNA in DO subjects.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.19447 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Ritchie, Jeffrey |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Division of Experimental Medicine) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002010427, Theses scanned by McGill Library. |
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