The ZDSD rat: a novel model of diabetic nephropathy.

The ZDSD rat is a new obese-diabetic rat model that expresses type 2 diabetes in the presence of an intact leptin pathway. During a long pre-diabetic state, the animals exhibit most of the features of metabolic syndrome including obesity, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, insulin resistance and decreased glucose disposal. The animals used in these studies were either allowed to become spontaneously diabetic at 16-30 weeks of age, or diabetes was...