HAEMATOLOGY AND INTERNAL ORGAN WEIGHTS OF MALE WEANLING WISTAR RATS FED DIFFERENT DIETARY PROTEIN SOURCES

Abstract

Male weanling Wistar rats (n=25) weighing 30-40g were randomly allocated to five dietary treatments in a completely randomised design to assess the haematology and organ weight changes on diets containing Casein-based diet (T1), Nitrogen-free diet (T2), Fish meal-based diet (T3), Soyabean meal-based diet (T4) and Groundnut cake-based diet (T5) for 15 days. At day 15, blood (2.5mL) was sampled from each rats (five/treatment) into a bottle with EDTA for the haematology. All the rats were thereafter sacrificed and dissected. The heart, liver, kidney, lungs and spleen removed
and weighed separately. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and ANOVA at α0.05. Respective packed cell volume (PCV) and haemoglobin in T1 (42.0% and 13.76g/dL) and T3 (42.4% and 14.04g/dL) were significantly higher (p<0.05) than in other treatments. Erythrocytes was highest (p<0.05) in T3 (7.1 x106/mm3) and lowest in T2 (5.8 x x106/mm3) (p<0.05). However, leucocytes, monocytes, mean corpuscular volume (MCV) and mean corpuscular haemoglobin (MCH) were not significantly affected (p>0.0) by dietary treatments. The liver and spleen weights showed no
significantly differences (p>0.05) across treatments. The relative heart weight (%) in T3 (0.46), T4 (0.44), T5 (0.49) were similar but significantly lower (p<0.05) than in T2 (0.51). Rats on T2 had higher kidney weight (1.19) while T1 (0.97), T3 (0.86), T4 (0.85) and T5 (1.00) were similar. Rats fed fish meal based diet showed slight improvement in haematological parameters compared to soyabean meal and groundnut cake. Therefore, dietary fishmeal was considered to be most favourable for the rat haematology. There was no visible effect of the dietary test samples on the assessed organs.