Adriamycin-induced cardiomyopathy can serve as a model for diabetic cardiomyopathy – a hypothesis

Diabetic cardiomyopathy is one of the life threatening complications of diabetes. A number of animal models are being used for studying diabetic cardiomyopathy. In laboratory animal models, induction of cardiomyopathy happens in two stages: first being the induction of diabetic condition and the second being the induction of cardiomyopathy by prolonging diabetic condition. It takes a longer time to develop diabetes with the limited success rate for development of cardiomyopathy. Adriamycin is an effective anti-cancer drug limited by its major side-effect cardiomyopathy. A number of features of Adriamycin treatment mimics diabetes. We postulate that Adriamycin-induced cardiomyopathy might be used as a model system to study diabetic cardiomyopathy in rodents since a number of features of both the cardiomyopathies overlap. Left ventricular hypertrophy, systolic and diastolic dysfunction, myofibrillar loss, and fibrosis are hallmarks of both of the cardiomyopathies. At the molecular level, calcium signaling, endoplasmic reticulum stress, advance glycation endproduct activation, mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammation, lipotoxicity and oxidative stress are similar in both the cardiomyopathies. The signature profile of both the cardiomyopathies shares commonalities. In conclusion, we suggest that Adriamycin induced cardiomyopathic animal model can be used for studying diabetic cardiomyopathy and would save time for researchers working on cardiomyopathy developed in rodent using the traditional method.