Interstitial fluid

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Interstitial fluid (or tissue fluid) is a solution that bathes and surrounds the cells of multicellular
animals. It is the main component of theextracellular fluid, which also
includes plasma and transcellular fluid. Theinterstitial fluid is found in the interstitial spaces, also
known as the tissue spaces.

On average, a person has about 11 litres (2.4 imperial gallons) of interstitial fluid, providing the cells of
the body with nutrients and a means of waste removal.

Production and removal

Plasma and interstitial fluid are very similar. Plasma, the major component in blood,
communicates freely with interstitial fluid through poresand intercellular clefts
in capillary endoth
Formation of tissue fluid
Hydrostatic pressure is generated by the systolic force of the heart. It pushes water out of the
capillaries.

The water potential is created due to the ability of small solutes to pass through the walls of capillaries.
This buildup of solutes inducesosmosis. The water passes from a high concentration (of water) outside
of the vessels to a low concentration inside of the vessels, in an attempt to reach an equilibrium. The
osmotic pressure drives water back into the vessels. Because the blood in the capillaries is constantly
flowing, equilibrium is never reached.
The balance between the two forces differs at different points on the capillaries. At the arterial end of a
vessel, the hydrostatic pressure is greater than the osmotic pressure, so the net movement (see net
flux) favors water and other solutes being passed into the tissue fluid. At the venous end, the osmotic
pressure is greater, so the net movement favors substances being passed back into the capillary. This
difference is created by the direction of the flow of blood and the imbalance in solutes created by the
net movement of water favoring the tissue fluid.

[edit]Removal of tissue fluid

To prevent a build-up of tissue fluid surrounding the cells in the tissue, the lymphatic system plays a
part in the transport of tissue fluid. Tissue fluid can pass into the surrounding lymph vessels, and
eventually ends up rejoining the blood.

Sometimes the removal of tissue fluid does not function correctly, and there is a build-up. This causes
swelling, and can often be seen around the feet and ankles, for example Elephantiasis. The position of
swelling is due to the effects of gravity.

[edit]Composition

Interstitial fluid consists of a water solvent containing amino acids, sugars, fatty acids, coenzymes,
hormones, neurotransmitters, salts, as well as waste products from the cells.

The composition of tissue fluid depends upon the exchanges between the cells in the biological tissue
and the blood. This means that tissue fluid has a different composition in different tissues and in
different areas of the body.

Not all of the contents of the blood pass into the tissue, which means that tissue fluid and blood are not
the same. Red blood cells, platelets, and plasma proteins cannot pass through the walls of
the capillaries. The resulting mixture that does pass through is, in essence, blood plasma without the
plasma proteins. Tissue fluid also contains some types of white blood cell, which help combat
infection.

Lymph is considered a part of the interstitial fluid. The lymphatic system returns protein and excess
interstitial fluid to the circulation.

The ionic composition of the interstitial fluid and blood plasma vary due to the Gibbs-Donnan effect.
This causes a slight difference in the concentration of cations and anions between the two fluid
compartments.

[edit]Physiological function
Interstitial fluid bathes the cells of the tissues. This provides a means of delivering
materials to the cells, intercellular communication, as well as removal of metabolic
waste.
References
Marieb, Elaine N. (2003). Essentials of Human Anatomy & Physiology (Seventh Edition ed.). San
Francisco: Benjamin Cummings. ISBN 0-8053-5385-2

• The Human Cardiovascular System

While fluid systems obey the same "laws" of physics as point particles, their
aggregate behavior is qualitatively different. That is, when considered as a
whole, the fluid has additional properties which point particles do not. We have
already seen two of these properties, density and viscosity. We will explore
these and other fluid properties in this chapter.

Our model of a fluid system will be the human cardiovascular system. We will,
as always, treat it in very elementary terms, so that the analyses we do are
tractable.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of our treatment of the human

cardiovascular system is the assumption that it is a closed system. That is, we
will assume that the amount of fluid is a constant. This is not exactly true in
reality, for fluid can pass through the membranes of the blood vessels in
response to changes in the concentrations of electrolytes in our body. This
process is called "osmosis". In addition, we can, of course, be injured and
bleed. We will ignore these details, and by doing so will be able to apply a
conservation principle to the system: what goes into a junction of blood
vessels also comes out of that junction.

The other critical idealization we will make concerns the structure of the
system. For us, the human cardiovascular system looks as follows:

1. Oxygenated blood is pumped from the left ventricle of the heart into the
aorta. The ventricle is one of the four chambers of the heart, and the
designation "left" is relative to the patient. The aorta is the vessel which
connects to the output of the heart.
2. From the aorta, the blood enters the arteries. Both the aorta and the
arteries have walls which expand and contract with the pumping of the
 blood, and they therefore act as auxilliary pumps, and as pressure
resevoirs. We will treat the arteries as if they all connect to the aorta:

while in reality they branch out from each other at various points:

3. From any given artery, the blood flows into arterioles. The arterioles are
smaller than the arteries, and in addition, the body uses the arterioles to
regulate the flow of blood in various parts of the body. For instance,
when the body is cold, the arterioles leading to the skin will narrow,
lessening the flow of blood and therefore of heat to the skin. Likewise,
the arterioles leading to the digestive system expand while digestion is
taking place, to increase the efficiency of that system. We will treat the
arterioles as if they all connect directly to an artery on their "leading"
end (the end the blood enters).
4. From an arteriole, the blood enters one or more capillaries. The
capillaries are extremely small; in reality, they are so small that the red
blood cells slide through one at a time, and the blood can no longer be
considered to be a homogeneous fluid with a well-defined viscosity. We
will ignore this detail. In the capillaries, the oxygen carried by the blood
is used by the body, and the blood which leaves the capillaries is called
"deoxygenated". Blood flow in the capillaries (and all of the way back to
the heart) is smooth; that is, the pulses of the heartbeat have been
smoothed out and the blood flows continuously with a constant pressure:

and velocity:
 5. Many capillaries feed into one venule. For our purposes, the only
distinguishing characteristic of a venule is its relative size. It is larger
than a capillary, and smaller than a vein. In reality, the subsystem of
arterioles, capillaries and venules forms a complicated mesh of
interconnections, but we will ignore those details.
6. Many venules feed into one vein. At this point, the blood has lost so
much pressure to dissipation (below) that it can barely make its way
back to the heart. The veins have one-way valves, which prevent the
flow of blood away from the heart, and the movement of the body's
muscles help to pump the blood toward the heart. We will of course
ignore this detail. So again, for us the only distinguishing characteristic
of a vein is its size.
7. All of the veins connect to the vena cava, which is the entry for
deoxygenated blood into the heart.

For our purposes, we will treat this as the closed system under consideration.
This means that we are going to ignore the pulmonary subsystem, which pumps
deoxygenated blood from the heart to the lungs, and re-oxygenated blood back
to the heart for entry into the system we described above. It also means that we
have another "conservation" principle available to us: the sum of the pressure
drops in the various vessels must equal the pressure applied to the system
by the heart. Since we think of pressure as an energy density, this is really just
a way of saying that the energy of the blood is equal to the work done against
dissipation.

From the above simplified description of the human cardiovascular system, we

can deduce the other major idealization we need: the system is purely
heirarchical. That is, we assume that there are no interconnections and
branchings between different types of vessels:

All arteries connect to the aorta at one end and to arterioles on the other. All
arterioles connect to an artery on one end and to capillaries on the other. All
venules connect to capillaries on one end and a vein on the other. And all veins
connect to the vena cava. This is a gross simplification of the actual system, but
it is a necessary one if we are to be able to treat the system at all quantitatively.

As the heart beats, the blood pressure in the aorta varies from the "systolic"
(maximum) pressure, which occurs as the ventricle pumps blood into the aorta,
to the "diastolic" (minimum) pressure, which occurs as the ventricle is filling.
For a healthy person of average build, the blood pressure is often quoted as
"120 over 80", which means that the systolic pressure is 120 mmHg
(millimeters of mercury, that is, the increase in height of a tube of mercury due
to the pressure) and the diastolic pressure is 80 mmHg. Expansion and
contraction of the arterial walls, as well as dissapation from viscosity (see
below), acts to reduce the pressure variations as the blood moves away from the
heart. In certain instances, we will ignore this "pulsatile flow", and assume that
the pressure is a constant within any given category of blood vessel.

For instance, we can compute the power output of the heart as the product of
the pressure times the flow (volume per unit time). If you have six liters of
blood and it circulates every minute, the flow rate is 100 cm 3 / s. If the pressure
averages 133,000 dynes / cm 2 (ignoring pulsatile flow), then the average power
output is 13,300,000 ergs / s or 1.33 Watts. This may not seem like much, but
consider the amount of energy produced by your heart in a day (86,400 s). This
is approximately 115,000 J, which is the energy the average (70 kg) person
would have after falling from a 550 foot tall building!

There is another pressure variation within the body which occurs when one part
of the body is at a different elevation than another. This is called "hydrostatic"
pressure, and arises because of the gravitational potential energy of the blood.
Essentially, blood that is at a higher elevation has greater potential energy, and
it "pushes down" on the blood at lower elevations. In fact, we will often think
of pressure as an energy density (energy per unit volume), so we can think of
the hydrostatic pressure as a gravitational potential energy density. The
hydrostatic pressure difference due to a difference in height is given by

ΔP = ρ g Δh,

where ρ is the density of the fluid (which for blood is 1.05 g / cm 3), g is the
acceleration due to gravity and Δh is the difference in height. If we use cgs
units, g = 980 cm / s 2, Δh is measured in cm and the pressure is then in dynes /
cm 2. We will usually ignore the hydrostatic pressure, by assuming that our
patients are lying down.
For the purpose of illustrating the units we will be using, however, let's look at
the hydrostatic pressure differences in a typical person. We quoted above a
healthy diastolic pressure of 80 mmHg. The conversion from mmHg to dynes /
cm 2 is

1333 dynes / cm 2 per mmHg.

If the diastolic pressure at the aorta is 80 mmHg, what is the pressure in the
neck 20 cm higher, and at the top of the legs 70 cm lower? Converting to cgs
units, the pressure at the aorta is 106,640 dynes / cm 2. This indicates the utility
of the more practical medical unit of mmHg. The hydrostatic pressure
differences are 20,580 dynes / cm 2 for the neck and 72,030 dynes / cm 2 for the
legs. These differences convert to 15.4 mmHg for the neck and 54 mmHg for
the legs, indicating a pressure variation of almost 70 mmHg over an
approximately one meter range of elevation. The resulting pressures are 64.6
mmHg in the neck and 134 mmHg in the legs. The measurement of blood
pressure is usually made in the upper arm since it is at approximately the same
elevation as the aorta.

The next section is about the nature of fluids.

The Nature of Fluids

The term "fluid" applies to both liquids and gases, and indeed to some things
which we think of as solids (ie., glass). The essential differences between fluids
and solids can be summarized as follows:

1. Fluids are shapeless. In more technical terms, we say that fluids do not
resist being "sheared". That is, it is relatively hard to bend a solid
object, but a fluid "splashes" under the same force.
2. When a force is applied to a fluid, the pressure increases, but whereas
the force is directional, the pressure is omnidirectional. Consider the
force applied to the surface of a glass of water by the atmosphere. That
force is downward, but the resulting pressure is felt throughout the
water. If we measure the hydrostatic pressure at any given depth, it is the
same on all sides of the measuring instrument. In cases where we can
ignore hydrostatic pressure and dissipative losses, the omnidirectionality
of pressure is equivalent to conservation of energy: the energy density
(pressure) is a constant throughout the fluid.
3. Fluids are "viscous" (but not necessarily viscious!). While fluids do not
resist shear, they do resist changes in the rate of change of shear. The
 more viscous the fluid, the greater its resistance to changes in the rate of
shear: colloquially, we say the fluid is "syrupy". In cgs units, viscosity is
measured in Poise: the viscosity of water is .01 Poise (dyne s/cm 2 = g /
cm s), and the viscosity of blood is .04 Poise.
4. Fluids flowing past a solid surface obey the "no slip condition". That, is
the velocity of the fluid at the solid surface is zero. This may seem
surprising, until you recall that your dishwasher often does not clean
well when, for instance, the dishes are coated with cheese. The no slip
condition means that the water by itself is not as effective as scrubbing
with a solid object, and so many of us wipe the dishes before putting
them in a dishwasher. Since the velocity of the fluid is nonzero
elsewhere, the no slip condition implies that a "velocity gradient"
exists in the flowing fluid. In a pipe (or blood vessel), the velocity
profile across the diameter is essentially parabolic:

v = ΔP (a 2 - r 2) / 4 l η,

where ΔP is the pressure difference between the "head" (upstream) and

"tail" (downstream) ends of the pipe, a is the radius of the pipe, r is the
position along the diameter from the center, l is the length of the pipe
and η is the viscosity of the fluid. For a cross section of the pipe, the
velocity gradient has circular symmetry:

The fact that the velocity is constant on each circle leads us to think of
the fluid as flowing in concentric "sheets", but in fact the velocity is a
smooth function of distance from the center. For higher viscosity, the
velocity gradient is shallower. Essentially, viscosity opposes the
existence of steep velocity gradients. The larger the viscosity, the
"gentler" is the shape of the parabolic velocity gradient, and the velocity
is more nearly constant across the section.
 5. Fluids are subject to turbulence. Smooth flow is called "laminar",
implying that layers of fluid flow past each other in a sheet-like fashion.
The flow is turbulent when eddies and vortices occur. Fluids lose energy
through dissipation in both types of flow. During laminar flow, the
viscosity causes "frictive" losses (due to "friction") between the sheets of
fluid: the fluid resists changes in the velocity gradient, and that costs
energy. In turbulent flow, energy is required to create the eddies and
vortices, resulting in an energy loss by the fluid as a whole.
• The next section is about Poiseuille's Law.