Adipose Tissues

[WSHRocks]

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Hi.

This is almost just a question out of curiousity, because it relates to what I was studying about adipose tissues (and probably not at all to the MCAT). Apparently, when adults gain weight, especially into overweight and obese situations, blood vessels grow along with the adipose tissues. Therefore, more obese people have a longer total length of blood vessels, which leads to hypertension. However, what happens to the blood vessels when a formerly obese person has lost (or is losing) weight? Are they somehow also metabolized?

Thanks,
WSH

 

[muhali3]

When you lose weight, you just lose the fat that is stored in the cells, but the adipose cells are still there. They just aren't filled with as much fat. Blood vessels are maintained because they still need to provide nutrients to keep those cells alive.

Also, longer blood vessels would decrease blood pressure, since there is more space for the blood to go to. I don't see how longer vessels would cause hypertension.

 

[WSHRocks]

I suppose the source material might be a bit vague: "Thus, an obese person has many more miles of blood vessels than does a lean person, a situation that can cause high blood pressure." I believe that it's saying that the many more miles of blood vessels necessitates the heart to pump more vigorously to maintain a steady flow of blood throughout the body, including flow into new blood vessel formation in the adipose tissues from angiogenesis. I do agree that the text might be overgeneralizing the multiple factors involved in hypertension, though.

Also, although it's true that the adipose tissue only loses most of the fat droplet, I still think that the new vessels would be superfluous after weight loss (they weren't there before the weight gain), so I was wondering if there was some kind of maintenance on them too keep them from become too unruly.

WSH