Jun Lu1, Beau Pontre2, Stephen Pickup3, Yee Soon Choong, Anthony Phillips, Hong Xu4, Garth JS Cooper, Alistair Young5
1School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand; 2Centre for Advance MRI, University of Auckland; 3Dept of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA; 4Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China; 5Dept of Physiology, University of Auckland
End stage diabetes is always associated with heart failure, which is the leading cause of death. We are the first to investigate the heart function and fat composition in STZ-induced diabetic rats using High Field MRI. Gradient echo cine method was used to determine cardiac function and fast spin echo Dixon method was used to detect cardiac fat composition. We found that the cardiac injection fraction of every rat decreased with prolonged diabetic status and cardiac fat disappeared after 8 weeks of diabetes. The results suggest that heart function impairment occur with long term diabetes in STZ rat model.