Paper Details

The effects of dietary lipid sources on hepatic histopathological features and serum biochemical indices of broiler chickens

Amir Moslehi, Ali Asghar Sadeghi, Parvin Shawrang, Mehdi Aminafshar

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.12692/ijb/5.12.182-190

Int. J. Biosci. 5(12), 182-190. December, 2014. (PDF)

Abstract:

This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of dietary lipid sources on histological characteristics of liver and biochemical serum parameters. In a completely randomized design, 240 one-day-old broiler chicks were assigned to 5 treatments, 4 replicates and 12 chicks per each. Liver samples were taken at days 28 and 42 of age. Chickens fed control diet had no lesions in liver at days 28 and 42 of age. Except for chicks fed control diet and those fed olive oil, in the liver of other birds lipid droplet accumulation or steatosis observed. Broilers fed corn oil revealed lipid droplet accumulation in both sampling times. While these symptoms were not observed in the chicks fed fish oil or olive oil. The chicks fed diet containing tallow had apparent characteristic as sinusoid dilation, hyperemia and intense hepatic degeneration at day 28 of age. There were no significant differences among treatments for the serum total protein, albumin and globulin of chicks fed control diet or diet containing different oil sources at day 28 and 42 of age. The highest means of AST and ALT were for chicks fed diets containing corn oil and tallow and the lowest one was for those fed diet containing fish oil and olive oil.  In conclusion, our result confirmed that fish oil as a source of n-3 poly unsaturated fatty acids was much more beneficial than n-6 poly unsaturated fatty acids or saturated fatty acids to keep the chicks in the healthy state.