¹³C-acetic acid breath test monitoring of gastric emptying during disease progression in diabetic rats

Gastric motility disturbance is commonly found in long-standing hyperglycemia. Both delayed and rapid gastric emptying has been reported in diabetes. However, very few studies have followed the changes in gastric emptying during disease progression in diabetes because of technical limitations. ¹³C-Acetic acid breath test is a validated method which is non-invasive and can be used repeatedly or serially to evaluate gastric emptying changes in animal. We investigated the gastric emptying changes in different stages of diabetes using ¹³C-acetic acid breath test, as well as its related mechanisms involving interstitial cells of Cajal (ICCs), and stem cell factor (SCF) in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats. The results showed that gastric emptying was accelerated at the early stage (12 weeks of diabetes) whereas intramuscular ICCs (ICC-IM) networks were not different from normal group. At long-term stage (28 weeks of diabetes), gastric emptying had returned to normal pattern with no delayed. ICC-IM networks were decreased in the diabetic group compared to 12th weeks, and were lower than in the normal group at the same time point. SCF levels were constantly high in the diabetic group than in the normal group. This result indicated that ¹³C-acetic acid breath test is useful to track the alteration in gastric emptying during disease progression. The change of gastric emptying was not found to be significantly associated with ICC-IM. Elevated SCF may help to preserve ICC-IM, especially in the early phase of diabetes.