LAUSR

Excessive consumption of carbohydrate and fat increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. We sought to determine the potential ultrastructural alterations in large blood vessels induced by a high fat and fructose diet (HFD) in a rat mode l of prediabetes. Rats were either fed with HFD (model group) or a standard laboratory chow (control group) for 15 weeks before being sa c ific d. The harvested thoracic aorta tissues were examined using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and blood samples were assayed for biomarkers of pre-diabetes.TEM images showed that HFD induced profound pathological changes to the aortic wall layers, tunica i ntima and tunica media ultrastructures in the pre-diabetic rats as shown by apoptotic endothelial cells with pyknotic nuclei, damaged basal lamina, deteriorated smooth muscle cells that have irregular plasma membranes, shrunken nucleus with clumped nuclear chromatin, damaged mitochondria and few cytoplasmic lipid droplets and vacuoles. In addition, HFD significantly (p<0.05) decreased adipone ctin and increased biomarkers of lipidemia, glycaemia, inflammation, oxidative stress, vascular injury such as soluble intercellular adh sion molecule-1 (sICAM-1), soluble vascular cell adhesion protein 1 (sVCAM-1), endothelin-1 (ET-1), and coagulation and thrombosis s uch as Von Willebrand factor (vWF), and plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1), compared to normal levels of these parameters in th control group. Thus, we demonstrated that feeding rats with a HFDisable to develop a pre-diabetic animal model that is useful t o study the aortic ultrastructural alterations.