How are obesity and hypertension related?
Biologists have found out why obese people often suffer from hypertension
The reason for the frequent development of hypertension, hypertension and other forms of chronically high blood pressure in overweight people (experiments were carried out on the line of rats with a tendency to obesity, but let's leave the "people" on the conscience of the translator – VM) is the enzyme arginase, which is involved in the process of excreting urea from the blood and which does not work properly in the human body with excess weight, according to an article published in the journal Obesity (Johnson et al., Arginase promotes endothelial dysfunction and hypertension in obese rats – VM).
"The development of hypertension can lead to serious health problems in the form of heart attacks, kidney failure, organ damage or rupture of blood vessels. Comparing healthy rats with their obese relatives, genetically predisposed to obesity, we found that their body contained little of the amino acid arginine due to the increased activity of the enzyme arginase, decomposing its molecules," says William Durante from the University of Missouri at Columbia (in a press release Enzyme Responsible for Obesity-Related Hypertension Identified – VM).
As Durante explains, arginine is not only one of the "bricks" from which the molecules of all proteins in our body are assembled, but also a kind of raw material for the production of nitrogen monoxide (NO) molecules that dilate blood vessels, slow down cell aging and have a beneficial effect on many other body systems.
In a healthy body, only special liver cells are engaged in the decomposition of arginine molecules, which convert this amino acid into urea and other compounds with the help of arginase and a number of other enzymes. As Durante and his colleagues discovered, not only the liver, but also the cells of the vascular walls participated in the decomposition of arginine in the body of obese rats.
As a result, the concentration of nitric oxide in the blood drops sharply, due to which the vessels of full rats were constantly in a narrowed state, which increased pressure and gave rise to chronic hypertension and hypertension.
Having discovered the cause and mechanism of the origin of high blood pressure, the authors of the article tried to neutralize it in two ways at once by adding arginine to the diet of one half of obese rats, and an arginase blocker to the lunches of the second.
As this experiment showed, both methods successfully lowered blood pressure and relieved all symptoms of hypertension, however, scientists themselves recommend using enzyme blockers, since an increase in the proportion of arginine in the blood and in the body can lead to a mass of potentially dangerous side effects.
In the near future, Durante and his colleagues plan to find out why arginase does not work properly in rats and overweight people, and will try to understand how this cellular malfunction may be associated with the development of obesity.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru06.05.2015