Adipose Tissue Can Swim? (in fruit flies, at least) But What Does This Mean for Lipedema?

Adipose Tissue Can Swim? (in fruit flies, at least)

But What Does This Mean for Lipedema?

by Kathleen Lisson, CMT,CLT

It's been super interesting week researching my book on Lipedema.

I find that I am looking at studies early in the morning, like first thing in the morning. It's really interesting to find something on social media that one of the Lipedema facebook group ladies is talking about or something that I get in in my email that kind of piques my interest and then kind of be jumping down that rabbit hole reading a study.

I just recently read a study from the journal Developmental Cell and it came out in February 2018 and it's about the fact that adipose tissue doesn't just sit there. It actually has a lot of different jobs that it needs to do in the body to keep our body healthy.

And it's super fascinating because this study talked about the adipose tissue in the fruit fly. So it's definitely not replicated with humans yet.

We're not sure if this is also in humans, but it opens up the idea that adipose tissue is involved in the healing process and super interestingly, in fruit flies. Adipose tissue seems to be able to swim - to move from one area of the body to the other and that it also sets up shop around places that have inflammation in the body, and it has something to do with helping with healing.

I know I've already heard that it has roles in giving off hormones and possibly being loosely connected to the endocrine system. So this means it just gives that third dimension to studying adipose tissue.

I guess before I started on this journey of learning things about adipose tissue, I thought, which I think a lot of people do think, is that fat cells are how we store energy so we can use it later when we don't have food. I feel like that's what I learned in school and what I learned on the average website is fat cells are just a storage system and it really does much more, which makes me think, - if fat cells are doing more than that, maybe it can help scientists in the future unlock the reason why the adipose tissue lays down the way it does in Lipedema and why it's super resistant to diet and exercise.

In the old model we just think 'if we eat too much, our body makes it into fat and if we don't eat a lot, the body takes the fat and then burns it so that we can survive,' that kind of idea of having fat as just a storage space for energy, like where you buy the storage space for $100 a month and then that's where you put kind of your crap, your extra stuff and then you'll use it when you need it.

Fat is much more than just buying a storage space for $100 a month and shoving some extra energy in it in the form of adipose tissue.

So this is super exciting to me. t's just super fascinating to me how many uses that our fat cells have in our body and I believe if we respect it and if we learn about it, if we learn about the adipose tissue, it will share it secrets with us and then we can, hopefully in my lifetime, maybe beyond my lifetime, unlock that and say, you know what, if the fat cells are doing their job, they are doing a good job in protecting the body, but all we're seeing is that it's painful in Lipedema. The symptoms are painful in the adipose tissue disorder, lipedema.

Maybe we can figure out why it's having to react that way and help the body so the adipose tissue doesn't have to react that way. And if we solve that deep core problem and then the lipedema tissue won't have to be set up the way it is.

And then, the ladies who suffer from lipedema won't have to endure the painful side effects of having lipedema, that painful symptoms, the eventual limited mobility that happens to some people who have lipedema for a long period of time.

So that's my passion. That's what's in my mind this week. And I hope to continue studying this fascinating disease and give you more information in future installments. Thanks!

Fat Body Cells Are Motile and Actively Migrate to Wounds to Drive Repair and Prevent Infection find the study here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29486196