Authors: T Pearson J A D Wattis J R King I A MacDonald D J Mazzatti
Publish Date: 2014/08/15
Volume: 76, Issue: 9, Pages: 2091-2121
Abstract
In healthy subjects some tissues in the human body display metabolic flexibility by this we mean the ability for the tissue to switch its fuel source between predominantly carbohydrates in the postprandial state and predominantly fats in the fasted state Many of the pathways involved with human metabolism are controlled by insulin and insulinresistant states such as obesity and type2 diabetes are characterised by a loss or impairment of metabolic flexibility In this paper we derive a system of 12 firstorder coupled differential equations that describe the transport between and storage in different tissues of the human body We find steady state solutions to these equations and use these results to nondimensionalise the model We then solve the model numerically to simulate a healthy balanced meal and a high fat meal and we discuss and compare these results Our numerical results show good agreement with experimental data where we have data available to us and the results show behaviour that agrees with intuition where we currently have no data with which to compareSince all of the governing Eqs 1–4 7–14 have the form mathrmdX/mathrmdt = A B X with A0 we can be sure that if X=0 ever occurs then X would increase and so provided we start with positive initial data the concentrations will remain positive for all time
Keywords: