MEETING ABSTRACT Open Access Hypoxia in obesity- from bench to bedside

It is generally accepted that hypoxia is related to sleep apnea in obesity. This concept has been changed since the report of hypoxia response in adipose tissue of obese mice by our group in 2007 [1]. The observation has been confirmed by many laboratories in multiple obesity model systems including mouse and human [2-8]. The adipose tissue hypoxia has been a new concept to explain the adipose tissue dysfunction in obesity [9,10]. It pro-vides a unified answer to all of the pathological changes in the adipose tissue under obesity, such as chronic inflammation, ER stress, leptin expression, adiponectin reduction, adipocyte death, elevated lipolysis and adipo-cyte insulin resistance [9,10]. Studies suggest that capil-lary dysfunction occurs during expansion of adipose tissue [11,12], and leads to reduction in adipose bloo