An animal model to the in vivo evaluation of cholesterol reduction by lactic acid bacteria

TARANTO, MARIA PIA; MEDICI, MARTA; PERDIGON, GABRIELA; FONT DE VALDEZ, GRACIELA

Public Health Microbiology Protocols

Humana Press Inc.

Lugar: Totowa- N. Jersey; Año: 2004; p. 417 - 422

For many years, it has been recognized that elevated serum cholesterol is a risk factor associated with atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease, the latter being a major cause of death in Western countries. Numerous drugs that lower cholesterol have been used to treat hypocholesterolemic individuals (1). However, the undesirable side effects of these compounds have caused concerns about their therapeutic use (2). At this respect, the ingestion of probiotic (beneficial for health) lactic acid bacteria would possibly be a more natural method to decrease serum cholesterol in humans (3) as it was reported for several authors (4, 5). Previous studies (6, 7) demonstrated that L. reuteri administered in low doses has an hypocholesterolemic effect both as therapeutic and preventive treatments. One of the key studies for the development of a probiotic is to determine the minimal effective dose of the alive microorganisms that might be ingested without producing adverse effects (i.e.: translocation) in the host. In this chapter, we described an animal model which allows to evaluate the reduction of hypercholesterolemia by BAL and, in addition, it also allows to determine the minimal dose of the microorganism as a critical step for the development of a safe probiotic product.