• Question: How do you work out how fat clogs up the blood if you have very little information to go on?

    Asked by Toffee2210 to Loan on 9 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Loan Nguyen

      Loan Nguyen answered on 9 Nov 2015:

      Good morning.
      Many thaks for your question. You are right, we have very little information as to HOW fat clogs up our arteries but we do have lots of evidence showing that fat block our arteries. With this very basic but useful information, scientists in my field of work including myself, begin to read more into the subject and gather bits of information from human studies, animal studies and computational models to make up a story about HOW fat gets stuck in the blood vessels and cannot not leave, ending up blocking our blood flow. We call this our HYPOTHESIS. I then plan many small sets of experiments to test if my hypothesis is true. One such experiment is to use mice and feed them a high fat diet for 3 or 4 months and take blood samples from these animals to test for any changes in the blood. If the blood from the high fat diet animal has one chemical which is higher or lower than that of the animal on a normal diet, I will investigate further; the role of this chemical is in the blood and in the organism. This will involve more reading and information gathering.

      Alternatively I can take cells from the blood vessels, grow them in a petri dish in different conditions to see what condition(s) the vessel cells are more likely to trap fat cells.

      Science work is very much like detective work, where you have a crime and you have to trace back to find the criminal. There will be many suspects and often there will be many guilty culprits. In the case of my work, I have the victime with atherosclerosis and i have to work out what has caused it. Is it the cells in the blood vessels which has gone rogue and trapped the fat cells? Or is it the fat cells which has invaded the blood vessels and are no refusing to leave? Or is it something else? I have to work through each suspect and eliminate one by one to identify the cause of the blockage.

      Hope that anwers your question. Keep on asking, it is the best way to learn.

      Loan

Comments