How the Lung Can Resist Edema Formation-Juniper Publishers
JUNIPER PUBLISHERS-OPEN ACCESS JOURNAL OF CARDIOLOGY & CARDIOVASCULAR THERAPY Opinion One generally thinks of the lung as being an extremely fragile structure to accomplish its main job, namely to assure gas diffusion, for which an extremely thin air-blood barrier, about 0.3μm thick, is required. Yet, the idea of a delicate and fragile structure does not hold when thinking of another function of the lung, namely that of keeping the interstitial space and the alveoli “dry”, thus preventing edema formation. From this stand point the lung appears quite a robust structure indeed. The pulmonary interstitum includes a fairly rigid fibrillar component (mostly collagen and elastin) and abundant “linking molecules” (from proteoglycan family) filling the frame of the fibrillary component, providing further rigidity to the lung tissue and keeping capillary permeability (the leakiness of the endothelium for water and solute) quite low [1]. A minimum volume of extravascular ...