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Gastrointestinal morphological alterations in obese rats kept under hypercaloric diets

Authors Nascimento, Mabel, Queiroz, Paresque R

Received 29 June 2012

Accepted for publication 3 September 2012

Published 14 June 2013 Volume 2013:6 Pages 479—488

DOI https://doi.org/10.2147/IJGM.S35482

Checked for plagiarism Yes

Review by Single anonymous peer review

Peer reviewer comments 2



Raphael Castiglioni Nascimento, Haryanne Mabel, Bruna Nunes Queiroz, Roberta Paresque

Departamento de Ciências da Saúde, Centro Universitário Norte do Espírito Santo, São Mateus, ES, Brazil

Abstract: Hypercaloric diets have been successfully used as experimental models of obesity. This work compared morphological characteristics of inferior gastrointestinal organs. The experiment lasted 10 weeks, during which the rats' food consumption, body weight, distance between the mouth and neck, distance between mouth and neck, distance between neck and tail, and abdominal circumference were evaluated weekly. After the sacrifice of the rats, 20 variables referring to inferior gastrointestinal morphology were assessed. The results comprised descriptive statistics of the data, analysis of main components, linear correlation, and t-tests. Significant differences were found between the two groups for the variables of abdominal circumference, retroperitoneal fat, ratio between retroperitoneal fat/animal weight, stomach weight, ratio between animal weight/intestine weight and mesentery/animal weight, length of small intestine, length of large intestine, and lateral line of the cecum. The data allow us to state that a hypercaloric diet can be responsible an increase in fat in the abdominal cavity as well as gastrointestinal morphological alterations, principally in stomach development.

Keywords: gastrointestinal morphology; hypercaloric diet; diet-induced obesity

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