Essay On Hyperlipidemia

The purpose of this research was to identify how hyperlipidemia effects heart performance. Hyperlipidemia is a condition in which excess cholesterol and triglycerol are present in the blood stream, and this study focused on the impact of high cholesterol. The activation of KATP channels by activators, cromakalim and diazoxide, is a cardioprotective mechanism seen in animals. The study focused on male Wistar rats, where ventricular tissue was extracted and processed for comparison between normal diet and cholesterol fed rats, while many tests included PCR analysis, Western blot analysis, etc. Cholesterol fed rats vs. normal fed rats showed a decrease in cardiac ATP production, an increase in lactate levels, and an increase in oxidative stress in myocardium. Gene expression changes were also considered to play a role in the

The conformation of the KATP channel subunit is determined by rectifier K channels, Kir, responsible of forming the pore subunit, and the sulfonylurea receptors that act as the regulators of K flux when bound to ATP [Alekseev]. In the cardiac cell, some activators of KATP channels studied were cromakalim, a nonselective KATP activator, and diazoxide, a selective mitochondrial KATP opener. This study proved that in normal diet rats, the activators increased cardioprotection by decreasing the size of damaged tissue, also known as infarct. However, in hyperlipidemic rats the infarct size did not decrease in size which demonstrated that the cardioprotective signaling does not function properly in high cholesterol diet [Csonka]. This study does not demonstrate if the decrease in ATP content affects the opening of potassium channels. ATP concentration does regulate the activity of the KATP channels and in the high cholesterol diet rats the levels of myocardial ATP amounts were lower than rats with a normal diet. In order words, when high cholesterol is present in the cell, the cell uses more ATP to maintain a balance