Bingdi Wang, Guofeng Sun, Yongqiang Liu, Jiqiu Qiao, Weiwei Ye, Hui Wang, Xiaoli Wang, Keefe Chng, Wei Qiao, Yixin (Jim) Wang, Yong-Fu Xiao
Obesity is viewed as one of the most serious public health issues of this century, which is likely due to economic growth, urbanization, modernization, life-style change and decreased physical activity. In 2013, the American Medical Association classified obesity as a disease. Sustained excessive accumulation of body fat to the extent, such as overweight or obesity, can reduce life expectancy and increase health risks, particularly heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Cardiovascular, diabetes and other health problems of obesity have been studied for many decades. Inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, hyperinsulinemia, lipotoxicity, medical and others, such as genetic background and aging, may result in obesity. However, the underlying precise mechanisms have yet to be elucidated further. Various obesity animal models have been used and induced for obesity research and therapy. To better understand the pathophysiology of human obesity, corpulent nonhuman primates (NHPs) are useful models due to resembling humans, not only physiologically but in eating habits (bored-eat). NHP obesity models have been developed and used for delineating molecular and cellular mechanisms and for testing new novel therapies, which provides critical pre-clinic information for drug discovery. We recently published the data obtained from naturally occurring diabetes NHPs. This article summarizes the data collected from a large scale of naturally occurring and high calorie (fat) diet (HCD)-induced obesity monkeys housed in our facility. Manuscript for another NHP model, streptozocin-induced diabetes, developed in our facility will follow lately.