Metabolic and cardiovascular disorders in highly inbred lines for intensive pig farming: how animal welfare evaluation could improve the basic knowledge of human obesity.

Intensive pig farming is currently performed with highly inbred lines of animals characterised not only by fast growing and low proportion of back-fat tissue, but also by an impaired development of muscular mass and cardiocirculatory system, and higher susceptibility to oxidative stress. This picture of genetically-determined metabolic alterations suggests the use of these lines as a nice tool for conducting comparative studies with human populations affected by high incidence of obesity and their sequelae, e.g. type 2 diabetes, arteriosclerosis, and cardiovascular diseases. The animal model offers, in fact, the advantages of low genetic variance, homogeneous feeding regime, and the absence of confounding factors typical of humans, such as smoking, alcohol drinking, etc. The similarity of pathological response to high caloric intakes between the two species supports the use of pig model for identifying genes and their variants associated with energy storage defects through the activation of both hormonal and biochemical pathways. To this purpose, the evaluation of animal welfare constitutes a nice opportunity to deepen the matter, through the evaluation of both ethical and physiological needs.