RESUMO
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the leading cause of chronic liver disease worldwide. It is characterized by the accumulation of lipids without alcohol intake and often progresses to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), liver fibrosis, and end-stage liver diseases such as cirrhosis or cancer. Although animal models have greatly contributed to the understanding of NAFLD, studies on the disease progression in humans are still limited. In this study, we used the recently reported high-fat L-methionine-defined and choline-deficient (HFMCD) diet to rapidly induce NASH and compared the responses to HFMCD in ICR mice from three different countries: Korea (supplied by the National Institute of Food and Drug Safety Evaluation), USA, and Japan during 6 weeks. Feeding HFMCD did not cause significant differences in weight gain in comparison with mice fed control diet. Relative weight of the liver increased gradually, while the relative weight of the kidneys remained unchanged. The parameters of liver injury (serum activities of alanine aminotransferase, aspartate aminotransferase, and lactate dehydrogenase) increased rapidly from 1 week and remained elevated for as long as 6 weeks. Histopathological analysis showed that the accumulation of hepatic lipids induced by HFMCD was prominent at 1 week after diet supplementation and increased further at 6 weeks. Inflammatory markers were significantly increased in a time-dependent manner by HFMCD. The mRNA levels of TNF-α and IL-6 were elevated approximately 15-fold relative to control diet and that of IL-1β was increased more than 20-folds at 6 week after the onset of HFMCD intake. In addition, mRNA expression of fibrosis markers such as α-SMA, TGFβ1, and Col1a1 were also significantly increased at 6 week. In summary, the responses of Korl:ICR mice by intake of HFMCD diet were similar to those of ICR mice from other sources, which suggests that Korl:ICR mice is also a useful resource to study the pathogenesis of diet-induced NAFLD.
RESUMO
A study was performed to develop as a screening tool the Simple Evaluation Questionnaire for Screening the Overweight-type Dietary Pattern in 30 to 49 Year Old Adults. We used the data from the 30 to 49 year old subjects who participated in the three surveys - the health behavior survey, the dietary habit survey and the food intake survey - as the National Health and Nutrition Survey 1998. The 3,598 adults were classified into to two body fatness groups of normal (including underweight) and overweight (including obese) on the basis of their relative body weight (RBW). When comparing variables between the two groups, significant differences were found in gender, education, job, employment status, perceived health status, sadness / depression state, stress level, age, number of diseases, age when overweigh-tedness started, maximum body weight, sleep length, drinking pattern (yes / no), amount of alcoholic drinks, frequency of intoxication or drunkeness, amount of alcoholic drinks when drunk, intensity of exercise, frequency of exercise, exercise duration, skipped meals, small meals and drug supplements. In terms of food intake, there were significant differences in the daily food intake in terms of breakfast, dinner, daily kimchi and dairy products. In terms of mealtimes, we found differences in the amount of cooked rice at breakfast, kimchi at lunch, soup / kuk at dinner, fresh vegetables for snacks, fried foods for snacks between breakfast and lunch, and fruits / juices for snacks between lunch and dinner. After developing questions with indicators and analyzing the indicators by logistic regression analysis three times, we chose 10 questions for a simple evaluation of dietary patterns for the overweight-type category in order to give one point each. Among them we selected two questions to add one additional point and one question to add two additional points. The average scores of the overweight and normal groups, as shown by the developed questionnaire, were 5.97 +/-2.36 and 7.36 +/-2.21, respectively. A score of seven points was selected as the cut-off point. We examined the sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value of the questionnaire to the results of 67%, 59% and 62%, respectively.