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Obesity and adiponectin

Published on April 26, 2009 Reviewed on November 24, 2015   33 min

A selection of talks on Clinical Practice

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0:00
Hello, my name is Philipp Scherer. I market Touchstone Diabetes Center at the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas Texas. It is my pleasure to talk to you today about the endocrine functions of adipose tissue with a particularly emphasis on the adipocyte-specific secretory protein, adiponectin.
0:23
I will structure my talk into four different sections. I will start out by discussing adipose tissue as an endocrine organ. We'll go through some hallmarks of dysfunctional adipose tissue and then follow up with our general discussion of fat-derived factors that we generally refer to as adipokines. Finally, I'll spend a significant amount of time discussing the physiological role and the use of adiponectin as a clinical marker.
1:01
Adipose tissue is ubiquitously distributed and system wide, there's not a single cell that's not affected directly or indirectly by fat-derived factors. These factors include lipid factors as well as protein-based hormonal factors, and key tissues that have been studied over the years include the vasculature, liver, the heart, pancreatic beta cells, as well as the reproductive tract, the brain, and muscle.
1:34
Predictably, fat-derived factors have a profound impact on energy metabolism. However, the last couple of years have also shown that adipocyte-derived factors have a profound impact on systemic and local inflammation, and vice versa, systemic inflammation has a profound impact on the pattern of adipocyte-derive secretory factors. In addition, fat-derived factors also play a role in the context of cancer, supporting tumor growth, for instance, in the context of breast cancer, and they also play a role in the context -of infectious disease models.