Question: What do you enjoy about making experiments and what you do?

Sally Barber answered on 14 Jun 2010:

I really enjoy spending time with my human participants and explaining to them what I’m doing, how it works and what I’m finidng out. It’s always great when I get results that show something new and I can think about why that happened.

Recently I was looking at some results from exercise tests where normal weight, overweight and obese people exercised until they could go no longer. I had taken some mesurements of how much blood their hearts were pumping around their bodies and how much pressure their hearts were generating. The heavier the participant was the better their heart was functioning. It didn’t make sense because I though being obese would mean that their hearts wouldn’t work as well. After thinking about it I realised that the heart is just a muscle and will get fitter when it has to work harder, just like any other muscle. So fatter people are heavier and so their heart muscle is lifting more weight ever time that person moves around.

But, the fat in overweight/obese people can produce chemicals which can damage the heart, now I am thinking that when a person has been obese for a long time and the chemicals that the fat produces builds up in the body it will affect the heart so that is can not work as well, like when an older person has diabetes. So, being fatter makes the heart stronger to start with and then makes it weaker when the chemicals that fat produces starts to damage the heart tissue. I need to do some more investigations to look into this.