Animal models in glucose intolerance and type-2 diabetes

There stilla are many unknown facts about the pathogenic mechanisms of such a prevalente disease nowadays as i type-2 diabetes mellitus (DM2). The advances in diabetes prevention and management will greatly depend on the understanding of these mechanisms; therefore, it will be essential to keep on using animal models on which carrying out experiments that would be urethical in humans. DM2 represents a heterogeneous group of diseases characterized by an increase in insulin resistance at periphera tissues and a deterioration in insulin secretion by pancreatic beta-cells, both abnormalities being highly interweaved. The mentioned heterogeneity of DM2 is also reflected by the high diversity of useful animal models for its study. The main DM2 models are reviewed, classifying them by their mechanism of action in spontaneous or induced. Also, two categories in each one of them are distinguiseed: analogous models, which try to imitate the human disease, and intrinsic models, with which we pretend to answer specific questions about the disease. The decision about which model to case for a particular experiment usually is multifactorial. Ideally, the experiments should be carried out in several different models, taking into account that none of them completely reflects the complexity of human DM2 and that precautions should be taken when trying to extrapolate the findings to the clinical practice.