Endocrine Abstracts

Obesity results from an imbalance between energy intake and expenditure. The WHO has considered it as a chronic disease which is associated with many complications, such as insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, etc. It is defined as an abnormal or excessive accumulation of body fat that can harm health. The distribution of this fat (visceral and subcutaneous), the size of the adipocytes and the inflammatory state of the adipose tissue are of great importance in the progression of this disease. The objective of this work is to study the effect of a long-term high-fat/high-carbohydrate diet (HFHC) on the subcutaneous adipose tissue histology of the gerbil. Gerbillus tarabuli, nocturnal desert rodents, is native to North Africa (south western Algeria). Our study involved 12 animal divided into 2 groups. Control group: gerbils received a natural diet (carrots and lettuce) and HFHC group: experimental animals were fed a high-fat/high-carbohydrate diet (barley, dried date and butter). After 20 weeks, gerbils were decapitated, their body weight measured, and subcutaneous adipose tissues were fixed in 10 % formalin solution for 24 h, dehydrated in graded ethanol, embedded in paraffin and stained with hematoxylin-eosin for microscopic observation. Our results show a significant increase in the final body mass induced by the HFHC diet. The histological examination revealed changes in the structure of subcutaneous adipose tissue (expansion, inflammation, and fibrosis) in HFHC group. Indeed HFHC diet increased both the accumulation of macrophages in visceral adipose tissue and in subcutaneous adipose tissue with the presence of significant vascularization and connective tissue deposition in the latter. Thus, we suggest that adipose tissue remodeling can affect all adipose tissues in the gerbil model submitted to long-term HFHC diet.