I am trying to induce type 2 diabetes in rats, there are several models for inducing type 2 diabetes, such as; STZ- induced diabetes, dexamethasone induced diabetes, High fat diet and ..... Which model is practical to do easily or conveniently?
STZ is more typically used to induce Type I diabetes as it damages the pancreatic beta-cells. A high-fat diet or other animal model prone to develop type II diabetes such as the Zucker diabetic fatty rat would be better.
Thank you for your response.
Some studies reported that administration of both streptozotocin (STZ) and nicotinamide (NA) induce experimental diabetes in the rat. STZ is well known to cause pancreatic B-cell damage, while NA is administered to rats to partially protect insulin-secreting cells against STZ. Is anybody experience this condition?
Thanks.
As you know, the Goto-Kakizaki (GK) rat is a non-obese Wistar substrain which develops Type 2 diabetes mellitus early in life; however, I think that these rats are so expensive, because this model is cryopreserved.
You don't want to cut corners by picking an easy and convenient model. You want a model that reflect your research question the best. None of the animal models is a 100% reflection of the human disease (even the human disease, diabetes, is not a homogeneous group). The high fat diet is very often used (and would be my preferred method), but takes some time to develop and not every individual animal is equally affected by the HFD. Furthermore HFD comes in a lot of varieties (10% to 95% fat, plant/animal fat, saturated/unsaturated, high/normal sugar, ...) which you should pick based on what suits your research question the best. Do you want to induce insulin tolerance and hence diabetes? Do you want to induce partial insulin secretory deficiency and then diabetes? Do you want to look at diabetes itself or one of the comorbidities (cardivascular diseases, neuropathic pain,...). We would need a bit more information to guide you to the best model for your research, and it is not a straightforward easy question to answer on an online forum.
Thank you so much for your excellent response. I am going to induce partial insulin secretory deficiency and then diabetes, because I want to investigate a new drug on diabetic rats.
I guess the idea is that the new expected drug would target the beta-cells. In that case, I would NOT recommend STZ or alloxan-induced models. You would probably destroy the target you want to measure. Does the drug affects insulin secretion in vitro, on isolated islets? if so, I would go to HFD and supplement one group with the drug during the HFD and another group as control. Compare their diabetic state with a glucose-tolerance test.
Best of luck!
Using STZ to induce type 2 is unconvincing , STZ is a drug target the beta-cells.
I thank you for the responses since I am also interested and currently facing the same challenge.
STZ is an easy and convenient drug model commonly used by researchers to induce diabetes mellitus in rats. If you wish, you may consider the option of using alloxan instead.
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