Iron toxicity mediated by oxidative stress enhances tissue damage in an animal model of diabetes.

Although iron is a first-line pro-oxidant that modulates clinical manifestations of various systemic diseases, including diabetes, the individual tissue damage generated by active oxidant insults has not been demonstrated in current animal models of diabetes. We tested the hypothesis that oxidative stress is involved in the severity of the tissues injury when iron supplementation is administered in a model of type 1 diabetes. Streptozotocin (Stz)-induced diabetic and non-diabetic Fischer rats were maintained with or without a treatment consisting of iron dextran ip at 0.