Adhesion: a confounding bias in murine cervical heterotopic heart transplantation

Tissue adhesion is a common postsurgical phenomenon among the human population. This complication also occurs in murine transplant models. In this study, we investigated the impact of adhesion on murine cervical heterotopic heart transplantation by using sodium hyaluronate (SH) as an anti-adhesive agent. Our study revealed that SH administration produced no significant effect on histological change, TNF-α, IFN-γ, MCP-1, IL-2, IL-6 and IL-10 expression, CD4(+) T, CD8(+) T, or neutrophil and macrophage counts. Our findings suggest that SH was biocompatible and non-immunogenic. Later, we observed that adhesion not only affected the survival of the graft without mediating rejection, but was closely related to the severity of rejection as manifested by larger and more severe adhesion formation in total-allomismatched and MHC class II-allomismatched murine cardiac allografts. Therefore, we inferred that using the murine cervical heterotopic heart transplant model may lead to an exaggerated p-value in statistical significance testing which could mislead experimenters in considering that the results are more significant than the fact. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first demonstration that proves that adhesion was a confounding bias in the murine cervical heterotopic heart transplant model and highlights the possibilities for improvement in future use.