Blood Coagulation Changes in Rats Fed High Fat Diets.

• For the past fift3 j-ears investigators have attempted to show a relationship between high lipid diets and the production of atherosclerosis and thrombosis. Recently interest has shifted from a consideration of diets in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis to a study of their association with alterations in the levels of coagulation factors as a possible cause of thrombus formation, a possibility suggested by Virchow many years ago. Thrombosis can be produced experimentally under certain conditions," enabling one to study the simultaneous alterations occurring in lipid fractions and in coagulation factors during thrombus formation. Thomas" and Davidson have shown that it is possible to produce in rats a high incidence of thrombosis by dietary means. An investigation of the changes occurring in the heniostatic mechanism of those animals dying of thrombosis has revealed alterations in the coagulation factors. In addition to the latter alterations, changes in the thromboelastographic records of plasma obtained from such rats suggest that fibrinolytic activity is decreased. Other findings, such as changes in the stickiness of platelets, in animals fed a high fat diet have also been reported. While most investigators have estimated changes in the level of coagulation factors using samples obtained when the animals were sacrificed, we have followed these changes sequentially in the living individual animals in an attempt to correlate the time of occurrence of changes in coagulation factors with the occurrence of thrombosis.