About the webinar:
Diet‑induced obesity (DIO) models continue to anchor preclinical research in obesity, metabolic dysfunction, and the wider cardiometabolic landscape. As the field increasingly recognizes how obesity shapes diabetes, heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and liver pathology, the need for well‑designed and reproducible diet‑induced phenotypes has only grown. Purified high‑fat diets remain a trusted approach because they consistently generate the core metabolic disturbances—obesity, insulin resistance, systemic inflammation—that underpin both cardiac and renal disease models. This webinar brings together these themes to show how DIO models now extend far beyond traditional obesity and type 2 diabetes studies.
A key area of focus is the use of high‑fat diets to model heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), where obesity‑driven inflammation, endothelial dysfunction, and mitochondrial stress play central roles in diastolic impairment. We will highlight widely used two‑hit paradigms that pair high‑fat feeding with hypertensive stimuli such as L‑NAME or AngII, illustrating how these combinations capture the complexity of HFpEF across preclinical models. We will also explore kidney‑related applications, including chronic kidney disease, diabetic kidney injury, and maternal programming studies showing how early high‑fat exposure can predispose offspring to renal vulnerability.
Together, these examples underscore a unifying theme: dietary fat overload acts as a primary upstream driver, while downstream phenotypes diverge into cardiac, renal, metabolic, or inflammatory pathways depending on the added stressors. This webinar aims to give researchers a practical framework for generating robust and translationally relevant DIO data.
