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Washington [US], Aug 23 (ANI): A stress signal received by the heart from fat may help protect against obesity-induced heart damage, suggests a new study by researchers at the University of Southwestern Medical Center. Texas.
The discovery, published online in Cell Metabolism, could help explain the “obesity paradox”, a phenomenon in which obese people have better prognoses of cardiovascular disease in the short and medium term compared to those who are skinny , but with ultimately worse results in the long run. .
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“The mechanism we have identified here could be one of many that protect the heart from obesity,” said Philipp E. Scherer, study director, Ph.D., professor of internal medicine and biology cellular at UTSW, which has a long history of studying fat metabolism.
Study co-lead Clair Crewe, Ph.D., assistant internal medicine instructor at UTSW, explained that the metabolic stress of obesity gradually causes fat tissue to become dysfunctional, causing shrinkage and death. of its mitochondria – the cell organelles that generate energy. Eventually, this unhealthy fat loses the ability to store the lipids generated by excess calories in food, poisoning other organs with an effect called lipotoxicity.
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Certain organs, including the heart, seem to put in place a preventive defense to protect against lipotoxicity. But how the heart detects the dysfunctional state of fat is unknown.
In their study, Dr Crewe, Dr Scherer and their colleagues used a genetic technique to accelerate the loss of mitochondrial mass and function in mice. When these animals ate a high-fat diet and became obese, the researchers found that rodent fat cells began to send out extracellular vesicles filled with small pieces of dying mitochondria.
Some of these mitochondrial extracts travel through the bloodstream to the heart, triggering oxidative stress, a condition in which cells generate harmful free radicals.
To counteract this stress, heart cells produce a flood of protective antioxidant molecules. This protective backlash was so strong that when scientists injected mice with extracellular vesicles filled with mitochondrial extracts and then caused a heart attack, the animals suffered far less damage to the heart than the mice that did not receive. injection.
Other research using fatty tissue taken from obese patients has shown that these cells also release extracellular vesicles filled with mitochondria, Dr Crewe said, suggesting that the effects seen in mice also occur in humans.
Eventually, she explained, the heart and other organs in obese people are overwhelmed by lipotoxic effects, resulting in many comorbidities of obesity. However, learning to artificially generate the protective mechanism identified in this study could lead to new ways to mitigate the negative consequences of obesity.
This knowledge might even suggest strategies to protect the heart from damage in lean individuals as well.
“By better understanding the distress signal from fat,” said Dr. Crewe, “we may be able to harness the mechanism to improve heart health in obese and non-obese people.”
Other researchers who contributed to this study include Jan-Bernd Funcke, Shujuan Li, Nolwenn Joffin, Christy M. Gliniak, Alexandra L. Ghaben, Yu A. An, Hesham A. Sadek, Ruth Gordillo, Yucel Akgul, Shiuhwei Chen and Christine M. Kusminski, all from UTSW; Dmitry Samovski and Samuel Klein of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; and Pamela Fischer-Posovszky from Ulm University Medical Center in Germany.
Dr. Sadek is the J. Fred Schoellkopf, Jr. Chair in Cardiology. Dr Scherer is the Gifford O. Touchstone, Jr. and Randolph G. Touchstone Distinguished Chair in Diabetes Research and the Touchstone / West Distinguished Chair in Diabetes Research.
UT Southwestern, one of the nation’s leading academic medical centers, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty has been awarded six Nobel Prizes and includes 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 members of the National Academy of Medicine and 13 researchers of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The full-time faculty of over 2,800 is responsible for revolutionary medical advancements and is committed to having physicians in the Southwest provide care in approximately 80 specialties to over 117,000 inpatients, over 360,000 emergency room cases and supervise nearly 3 million outpatient consultations per year. . (ANI)
(This is an unedited, auto-generated story from the Syndicated News Feed, the staff at LatestLY may not have edited or edited the body of the content)
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