Acrolein-Mediated Mechanisms

It is well known that traumatic injury in the central ner-vous system can be viewed as a primary injury and a secondary injury. Increases in oxidative stress lead to breakdown of membrane lipids (lipid peroxidation) during secondary injury. Acrolein, an alpha,beta-unsaturated aldehyde, together with other aldehydes, increases as a result of self-propagating lipid peroxidation. Historically, most research on the pathology of secondary injury has focused on reactive oxygen species (ROS) rather than lipid peroxidation products. Little is known about the tox-icology and cell death mediated by these aldehydes. In this study, we investigated and characterized certain fea-tures of cell death induced by acrolein on PC12 cells as well as cells from dorsal root ganglion (DRG) and sympa-thetic ganglion in vitro. In the companion paper, we eval