Effect of a salt restriction diet on cardiac damage in a rat model of metabolic syndrome. Rattus norvegicus

We wanted to understand how a salt restriction diet could improve cardiac damage (ie cardiac hypertrophy, fibrosis, hypertension) in a rat model of metabolic syndrome. We thus performed an Agilent microarray experiment in order to identify expression variations in left ventricles of rats having a normal sodium diet (0,64%) or a low sodium diet (less than 0,01%) Overall design: Sprague-Dawley rats were fed for 8 weeks 60% fructose diet with either a normal sodium (0.64% NaCl) or a low sodium content (<0.01% NaCl) (n=40 in each). After 4 weeks, rats were infused or not with angiotensin II (200 ng.kg-1.min-1, sc) for 4 weeks. At the end of the experiment, heart left ventricles were collected in RNA later for further mRNA extraction.