EVALUATION OF THE MECHANISMS OF CELL SENESCENCE, PROLIFERATION AND DEATH IN THE LIVER OF PREGNANT RAT SUBMITTED TO HIGH-FAT DIET.

• Grant number: 23/18164-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: April 01, 2024
• End date: March 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine - Maternal and Child Health
• Principal Investigator: Débora Cristina Damasceno
• Grantee: Isabela Rocha Silva
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Medicina (FMB). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Botucatu. Botucatu , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Adherence to a healthy diet during pregnancy is essential for preventing gestational disorders that can compromise various organs and tissues, such as the liver. During pregnancy, the liver grows slightly and has a greater work capacity. Considering experimental models in animals, it has already been demonstrated that rats that consumed a high-fat diet from weaning until adulthood (120 days) showed hepatocyte hyperplasia, an inflammatory process and increased apoptosis and hepatocellular senescence, but these studies had no association with pregnancy. Therefore, the objective of the work is to evaluate whether the process of proliferation, senescence and cell death are involved in exacerbating the increase in liver size at the end of pregnancy in rats submitted to a high-fat diet. For this, control Sprague Dawley rats (who did not consume a high-fat diet from weaning until the end of pregnancy) and who consumed the diet will be used to collect, at the end of 21 days of pregnancy, liver samples to evaluate Ki-67 immunostaining. (cell proliferation), activated caspase-3 (cell death) and Sudan black (cell senescence). Comparison of the data obtained will be carried out using Student's t test, considering p< 0.05 as the limit of statistical significance. The project was approved by the Ethics Committee on the Use of Animals of the Faculty of Medicine of Botucatu (Protocol Number: 1341/2019).