Hypoxia aggravates non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in presence of high fat choline deficient diet: A pilot study

NAFLD is a chronic and progressive disease for which there are no FDA-approved drugs available in the market. Drug discovery is a time-consuming procedure and requires screening of hundreds of small molecules to find new chemical entities (NECs) for a particular disease. Current preclinical NAFLD animal models take a longer time, which enhances the duration and expenses of the screening procedure. Hence to shorten the duration, we have proposed a preclinical animal model for rapid induction of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), an advanced stage of NAFLD in rats. The animals were divided into three groups; control, high fat choline deficient (HFCD) and high fat choline deficient diet with sodium nitrite (40 mg/kg b.w. i.p. per day) (HFCD + NaNO2) respectively. Four weeks later physical and serum biochemical parameters were assessed, intraperitoneal glucose tolerance test was performed, and histopathology and gene expression were analysed. Hypoxic stress aggravates the lipid accumulation, ballooning, lobular inflammation and fibrosis in hepatic tissue in presence of HFCD diet. This novel rodent model could be a useful NAFLD model to screen small molecules rapidly for treatment of NASH.