Spice Up Your Life: Adipose Tissue and Inflammation
Figure 1
Schematic of body fat in a human population and the presence of macrophages in lean and obese adipose tissue. (a) The bell-shaped curve represents the distribution of body fat in a human population. The healthy weight (within the 1 standard deviation of the healthy weight) is shown between the black dashed lines. In recent decades, this curve has shifted to the right, shown by the diagonal shaded red lines. The increase in this body weight is also associated with various single nucleotide polymorphisms found in the general population. On the extreme ends, monogenic forms of congenital generalized lipodystrophy (CGL) and obesity are shown in the circles. Various genes associated with these monogenic forms are mentioned in the text. (b) Anti-inflammatory M2 macrophages in the lean adipose tissue are converted to proinflammatory M1 macrophages in the obese adipose tissue which depends on chronic nutrition, chemokine, and cytokine signaling.
