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Christine Oltman, PhD

Contact Information:

Office: Building 40 VA
Phone: 319-338-0581


Brief description of current research:

Obesity increases the risk for hypertension, stroke, hypercholesterolemia, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.  A prelude to cardiovascular disease in obesity and type 2 diabetes is development of vascular dysfunction.  We have shown that an obesity prone phenotype exacerbates cardiovascular, metabolic and microvascular complications associated with high fat diet.  The major goal of my laboratory is to study the effect of diet induced obesity on vascular reactivity.  Our model is obesity prone and obesity resistant rats which have been maintained on control or high fat diets for up to 42 weeks.  We have obtained weight, heart rate, blood pressure and activity measurements in these rats for 42 weeks.  We have also determined insulin sensitivity and coronary and mesenteric vascular reactivity in these rats after 8 and 42 weeks on diet.  We are currently using the obesity prone model study the added effect of diabetes on vascular function.

3 most influential diabetes/obesity/metabolism publications:

  • Davidson, E.P., L.J. Coppey, N.A. Calcutt, C.L. Oltman, M.A. Yorek.  Diet-induced obesity in Sprague-Dawley rats causes microvascular and neural dysfunction.  Diabetes Metab Res Rev. 26: 306-18, 2010.
  • Oltman, C.L., E.P. Davidson, L.J. Coppey, T.L Kleinschmidt, B. Dake, M.A. Yorek.  Role of the effect of inhibition of neutral endopeptidase on vascular and neural complications in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats.  Eur. J. Pharmacol.  650:  556-62, 2011.
  • Lamping, K.G., D.W. Nuno, L.J. Coppey, A.J. Holmes, S.Hu, C.L. Oltman, A.W. Norris, M.A. Yorek.  Modification of high saturated fat diet with n-3 polyunsaturated fat improves glucose intolerance and vascular dysfunction.  Diabetes Obes Metab. 15: 144-52, 2013.