Abstract
Rabbits are a useful animal model for examining human hyperlipidemia and atherosclerosis because they have unique features of lipoprotein metabolism that are similar to those in humans. Feeding rabbits a cholesterol-rich diet is a simple means to induce experimental atherosclerosis. Indeed, cholesterol-fed rabbits were first applied to address the relationship between dietary cholesterol and atherosclerosis more than 100 years ago. However, the methods for investigating atherosclerosis using cholesterol-fed rabbits have not been well formulated. In this chapter, we attempt to provide readers with the essential methods to use cholesterol-fed rabbits in the examination of atherosclerosis from cholesterol diet preparation to lesion analysis. These protocols are compiled for both experienced and young researchers who intend to use rabbits for the investigation of lipoprotein metabolism and atherosclerosis.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Mrs. Kato, Y. for her technical assistance in making pathological specimens. This work was supported in part by JSPS KAKENHI (JP17K08783 and JP15H04718), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81941001 and 81770457), Innovation team programme supported by Guangdong Province (2020KCXTD038), and the JSPS-CAS Bilateral Joint Research Program (JPJSBP 120187204).
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Fan, J., Niimi, M., Chen, Y., Suzuki, R., Liu, E. (2022). Use of Rabbit Models to Study Atherosclerosis. In: Ramji, D. (eds) Atherosclerosis. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2419. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1924-7_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1924-7_25
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