Department of Nephrology, The Second Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun 130041, China.
J Diabetes Res. 2013;2013:797548. doi: 10.1155/2013/797548. Epub 2013 Jun 13.
Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is one of the microvascular complications of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, which is also associated with a poor life expectancy of diabetic patients. However, the pathogenesis of DN is still unclear. Thus, it is of great use to establish appropriate animal models of DN for doing research on pathogenesis and developing novel therapeutic strategies. Although a large number of murine models of DN including artificially induced, spontaneous, and genetically engineered (knockout and transgenic) animal models have been developed, none of them develops renal changes sufficiently reflecting those seen in humans. Here we review the identified murine models of DN from the aspects of genetic background, type of diabetes, method of induction, gene deficiency, animal age and gender, kidney histopathology, and phenotypic alterations in the hope of enhancing our comprehension of genetic susceptibility and molecular mechanisms responsible for this disease and providing new clues as to how to choose appropriate animal models of DN.
糖尿病肾病（DN）是 1 型和 2 型糖尿病的微血管并发症之一，也与糖尿病患者的预期寿命较差有关。然而，DN 的发病机制尚不清楚。因此，建立合适的 DN 动物模型对于研究发病机制和开发新的治疗策略具有重要意义。尽管已经开发出大量包括人工诱导、自发和基因工程（敲除和转基因）在内的 DN 小鼠模型，但没有一种模型能充分反映出人类的肾脏变化。在这里，我们从遗传背景、糖尿病类型、诱导方法、基因缺失、动物年龄和性别、肾脏组织病理学以及表型改变等方面综述了已鉴定的 DN 小鼠模型，以期增强我们对该疾病遗传易感性和分子机制的理解，并为如何选择合适的 DN 动物模型提供新的线索。
