ISSN: 2578-4641
Authors: Kulvinder Kochar Kaur*, Allahbadia G and Mandeep Singh
Recently obesity has become a worldwide epidemic, with over 600 million adults worldwide being obese of which 10.8% are males and 14.9% females. Now obesity has overtaken undernourishment for the first time and is increasing by leaps and bounds. Hence marked efforts are being done to understand the aetiopathogenesis. In our earlier reviews we have tried to understand the aetiopathogenesis involving different aspects like inflammation in general in obesity, hypothalamic inflammation, GIT inflammation, and others which have influenced development of medical treatments having edge over bariatric surgery but have not been successful in getting any stable medical therapy that can be used for long. Natural Killer (NK) cells represent one of the populations of the lymphocytes belonging to the innate immune system. By definition they are the cells that have the capacity to kill infected or transformed cells without needing any previous activation. Besides their cytotoxic capacity, they can also produce inflammatory cytokines like interferon gamma (IFNγ) and thus are a key part of early immune responses. In view of these abilities which make them stand out, these NKcells are very important parts for host protection, mainly antitumor and antiviral immunity. In the last 10years, a lot of work has been done to study the effect of obesity on NKcell biology, giving a full briefing of systemic dysregulstion of NKcell functions. Recently various publications have examined the role of NKcells in the homeostasis of adipose tissue (AT) and the aetiopathogenesis of obesity. Here we review studies pertaining to the role of how NKcells are involved in obesity.
Keywords: Natural Killer Cells, Obesity; Cancer; Adipose Tissue
