New research from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Virginia (United States) has explained why obesity causes harmful inflammation that can lead to diabetes, obstructed arteries and other health problems.
"All these diseases have a common denominator. We could have identified the mechanism that begins the inflammation chain and metabolic changes in the body," says researcher Vlad Serbulea.In this research, and for the first time, scientists have been able to explain why immune cells of adipose tissue (immune cells that are believed to be beneficial) become harmful during obesity and cause unwanted and unhealthy inflammation.
The research team, led by Norbert Leitinger, of the Department of Pharmacology of the University of Virginia, has discovered that free radical harmful produced inside the body react with lipids inside the adipose tissue.This attack on lipids drives them to cause inflammation, a natural immune response."Free radicals are so reactive that they want to get hooked on something. Lipids are a good sink so that these radicals combine," Serbulea explains.
That results in a process called lipid oxidation.At first, scientists expected rusty lipids to prove to be harmful, but it was not so simple.Some of the rusty lipids were causing harmful inflammation, rescheduing immune cells to become hyperactive, but other oxidized lipids were present in the healthy tissue.Specifically, the shortest are protective, while the longest are inflammatory.
"When we compare the healthy and obese tissue, what seems to change is the proportion of oxidized lipids for its length. Our studies show that louder lipids of long length are quite inflammatory, promote inflammation within these immune cells, and we believethat instigates and perpetuates the disease process inside the fatty tissue during obesity, "explains Serbulea.
A medication to combat inflammation of obesity
Now that scientists know what rusty lipids are causing problems, and how they can try to block them to prevent inflammation, these researchers consider that "it is possible" to develop a medication, for example, that reduces the amount of oxidized lipids of complete length.
"Now, knowing that some of these molecules are really bad, so to speak, eliminating them from circulation can have a very beneficial effect on chronic diseases," says Serbulea.
Alternatively, doctors might want to promote the amount of more beneficial and shorter phospholipids."Inflammation is important for your body's defenses, so you don't want to eliminate it completely. It is a matter of finding the right balance," he says.
When restoring that balance, "significant" advances could be made against chronic diseases that now affect millions of people."One thing we demonstrate is that metabolism in immune cells is an exploitable objective. It has been an objective in diseases such as cancer, but now for obesity and atherosclerosis, a reference point becomes increasingly," concludes the researcher.
