High fat feeding in mice is insufficient to induce cardiac dysfunction and does not exacerbate heart failure (688.11)

Feeding high fat diet (HFD) to mice is a commonly used model to investigate the impact of risk factors on cardiovascular physiology and the development of disease. Therefore, we sought to investigate whether a high fat diet (HFD) alone could produce cardiac dysfunction. Mice were fed a normal chow diet, a milk-based HFD (60% cal from fat), or a lard-based HFD (60% cal from fat) for a period of 28 weeks. Neither anesthetized (at 18 weeks) nor conscious echocardiography (28 weeks) revealed any evidence of cardiac dysfunction, despite elevated body fat in the two HFD groups. We next evaluated whether a HFD would exacerbate cardiac dysfunction during heart failure. Mice fed a HFD were subjected to myocardial infarction but experienced no more significant ventricular dysfunction than normal diet fed mice. These largely negative results compelled us to investigate a more severe model of hyperglycemia/obesity. Next, db/db mice were subjected to myocardial ischemia-reperfusion and demonstrated a significant reduc...