Kidney and Blood Pressure Abnormalities and Cardiac Hypertrophy, Accompany Moderate Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis in Western Diet Fed SR-BI/LDLR Double Knockout Mice

Abstract

Mice lacking the HDL receptor, SR-BI, are susceptible to spontaneous or diet-inducible occlusive coronary artery (CA) atherosclerosis and myocardial infarction (MI) in the context of absence, or reduced expression of apoE, respectively. Our lab has generated mice lacking both SR-BI and the LDL receptor (dKO mice). When fed diets that are very high in cholesterol, SR-BI/LDL R dKO mice develop rapid CA atherosclerosis and large transmural MIs and exhibit significantly reduced survival. However, when fed a western type diet (WTD) with only moderately high cholesterol (22% fat, 0.125% cholesterol), dKO mice do not appear to exhibit reduced survival, and develop only mild CA atherosclerosis with . However they have significantly larger hearts than LDLR single KO (sKO) controls fed the same diet for the same period of time. We therefore examined additional factors that may account for the cardiac hypertrophy observed in these mice such as blood pressure (BP) and kidney pathology.