INVESTIGATIONS INTO HYPERLIPIDEMIA AND ITS POSSIBLE ...

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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION AND
LITERATURE REVIEW
Lipoprotein metabolism and hyperlipidemia in dogs
History of the investigation of canine lipoproteins and lipoprotein metabolism
The first studies investigating canine lipoproteins were published in the 1940s
and 1950s. 1-5 Without exception, these studies used dogs as an experimental animal
model to study human disease. Most of these studies used a combination of methods to
separate and classify the lipoprotein profiles of the dogs, including different forms of
ultracentrifugation (e.g., sequential ultracentrifugation, analytical ultracentrifugation),
flotation rates, precipitation with sulfated polysaccharides (e.g., dextran sulfate), and
electrophoresis (e.g., paper electrophoresis). These methods are rarely used today, at
least in the fashion that they were used in those initial studies, and their accuracy is now
considered to be rather limited. Also, the majority of methods used in these initial
studies were optimized to analyze lipoproteins in human serum, which, in contrast to
dogs, predominantly contains low-density lipoproteins (LDL). Thus, complete separation
of canine LDL and high-density lipoproteins (HDL) was not always achieved. 1-5
Furthermore, information about food withholding was not always available, and
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This dissertation follows the style of Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine.