Epicardial fat from guinea pig: a model to study the paracrine network of interactions between epicardial fat and myocardium?
The amount of Epi is closely correlated to the amount of other types of visceral fat, to insulin resistance and other features of the metabolic syndrome, but also to cardiac hypertrophy and cardiac dysfunction. The data provide evidence that the guinea pig heart is a suitable model to analyze the interactions between Epi, heart vessels and muscle tissue. It allows identifying the influence of nutritional and metabolic alterations on the complexity of the network of locally released mediators for heart structure and function. A deeper understanding of this animal model may be helpful to analyze the interactions between Epi and the myocardium in humans-where the availability of tissue and the possibilities to modify nutritional and metabolic influences on heart are restricted-and the impact of Epi on cardiovascular risk.
Hepatocyte apoptosis biomarker, M30 is a promising non-invasive alternative to liver biopsy in chronic HBV infection upon treatment evaluation.