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Course: Health and medicine > Unit 1
Lesson 12: Lymphatic system introductionHow lymphatic vessels move fluid
Find out how the body's mysterious second circulatory system works. Learn how it can move fluid even when it has no heart of its own. By Patrick van Nieuwenhuizen. . Created by Patrick van Nieuwenhuizen.
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- How do people with very limited mobility, or perhaps none at all, generate enough pressure to drive the lymphatic fluids back into the blood stream?(44 votes)
- Good question. When people are NOT able to return all the lymph back to their blood stream, some of it may stay in the interstitial fluid outside of the circulatory system and cause swelling in those areas. This swelling is called EDEMA and commonly occurs in the feet, legs, or other parts of the body where gravity makes it most difficult for the lymph to return to the blood stream. In addition to the folks that you mentioned who may have limited mobility, other folks who are at risk of developing edema include anyone who sits or stand a lot, pregnant women (where the enlarged uterus makes interferes with blood & lymph flow), as well as individuals with other medical problems such as heart, liver of kidney disease. Hope this helps. Good luck.(74 votes)
- Does taller people heart need to pump more or apply more pressure? I can guess from the videos that the average BP right at the aorta is ~ 100mmHg. Is this higher in taller people. I ask because i am thinking about the distance blood needs to travel from their legs from inferior vena cava into the heart. (apologies if this sounds stupid. I am from finance and got pretty much interested in human biology when i was looking at at sal's video on TSH)(7 votes)
- I couldn't find any information on the correlation between height and elevated blood pressure.
My guess or at least what makes sense in my mind (highly likely to be incorrect) is that the size of the heart scales in relation to the size and/or mass of the individual. A pathological example of this would be cardiomegaly ( an enlarged heart) which occurs for many reasons, one being obesity.
In a non-pathological state ie: a tall individual, perhaps the heart is slightly bigger to accommodate for the larger work load. Thus, the heart has a higher contractile force and the individuals blood pressure does not need to be elevated.(2 votes)
- How long does it take for the lymph to reenter blood flow after it enters the lymph vessel?(5 votes)
- It depends on person to person. If one person's lymph tract is longer they may take more time. But the path keeps on circulating. Once it has enough plasma collected it will rerun the cycle. Hope this helps!
Best,(2 votes)
- how do interstitial fluid and lymph differ from blood plasma?(1 vote)
- Hello Josephine,
Those three fluid components are all different - interstitial fluid, lymph, and blood plasma. I'll describe each, so you understand how they're different from one another:
(1) "Interstitial fluid" is the fluid surrounding cells. It is a common misconception that the fluid surrounding cells is blood - this is not the case. Cells are actually surrounded by a thin layer of liquid, and this liquid is called "interstitial fluid".
(2) "Lymph" is a fluid in a different compartment than blood or interstitial fluid. Lymph is in the "lymphatic system", and is an important part of the immune system (perhaps you've heard of "lymph nodes", which can swell with fluid and immune cells when you have an infection).
(3) "Blood plasma" is the fluid-part of blood, after you remove all the cells, such as red and white blood cells. It contains salts, proteins, and water, but no cells.
I hope this helps!(7 votes)
- Do people with very limited mobility suffer health problems because their lymph system is not working as well as it would if they could move?(4 votes)
- Yes, in that way, many but not all of them are unfit and have high blood pressures.(0 votes)
- Do people with low blood pressure have less lymph surrounding the capillary beds?(3 votes)
- Not necessarily, if the low blood pressure is a result of vasodilation then the lymph formation will usually be increased. This is also the case in patients with right side heart failure, as the right side of the heart is unable to pump blood out to the lungs blood gets backed up in the venous system leading to edema and excess fluid/lymph in the peripheral tissue. If the person is otherwise normal then yes lymph formation is a direct result of blood, osmotic and hydrostatic pressures.(2 votes)
- What happens when a collection of lymph is swelling in places such as axillary, the perineal area, and back? Is it safe to squeeze these areas of collection? I guess they are called "cysts." How does this interrupt the flow of the lymph system?(3 votes)
- what makes the interstitial fluid go into the lymphatic vessels?(2 votes)
- why is it important for lymph vessels to have low pressure relative to blood vessels?(1 vote)
- Lymph vessels are low pressure and have bigger potential openings between cells allowing cells, debris and excess fluids to enter the lymphatic capillaries. This fluid and material including lymphocytes enter the lymph capillaries and must travel to a lymph node, where it perchlorates through the lymph node and then travels on up the lymph vessels until it gets to the subclavian vein where it is dumped into the blood circulation. Most fluid that leaves the arteriole side of the capillaries is returned to the venule side of the capillaries, but some fluid moves into the lymph vessels sweeping bacteria in with it. etc. We want the cells to enter the lymph because 1 . they can't enter the blood capillaries directly and they are too big so otherwise they would accumulate in the tissue and 2. They can start up the immune response going into the lymph node and activating the T lymphocytes there.(3 votes)
- At, how is the pressure rising in the lymphatic vessel if the lymphatic system is a low pressure system? 5:19(2 votes)
- Even if it's a low pressure system, the pressure won't stay exactly the same constantly, especially if the lymphatic vessels have to squeeze in order to get the fluid moving. Hope this helps!(1 vote)
Video transcript
The heart pumps blood
throughout the body, and it pumps so powerfully
that it actually squeezes some fluid out of
the capillaries. And that fluid becomes lymph. And it's the lymphatic system
that gathers all that fluid and brings it back
into circulation. But this idea might bother you. You might have an
objection, which is these lymph vessels don't
have a heart of their own. I didn't draw one, and it's
because they don't have one. So how is it that
they're able to pump this fluid in one direction? And moreover, how
is it that they're able to pump it back into this
high-pressure system, given that they don't have a pump? That must be quite difficult. There are two answers
to this question really, and the first is
a little simpler. So let's start there. The first answer is essentially
in the location of reentry. So the reason why lymph
is able to get back into the high-pressure
system is because lymph is quite intelligent
about where it tries to reenter the
high-pressure system. So I'm drawing a star
here because that's where the lymph reenters. I didn't draw that by accident. It reenters at the very end of
the venous circulation system, and the pressure
there is much lower than the pressure
in the arteries and even the pressure
in the capillaries. The numbers are actually
pretty striking. The pressure here in
the early arteries can be about 120
millimeters of mercury. That's kind of like your
average blood pressure. But over here, just before
it enters the heart, the pressure is more like
five millimeters of mercury. So the fact that the lymph fluid
enters circulation at the end here makes it much easier. It has to fight
against much less. If the lymph vessels ended
up trying to drain here, let's say into the aorta
or into a big artery, probably none of
this would work. So that makes the
job easier, but it doesn't explain how lymph
moves sort of one-directionally into the blood vessels. What is actually
forcing the lymph? What is getting it to
move in this direction? Why wouldn't it just come back
as much as it would go forward? And the reason why that's not
the case is because of valves. So valves are structures
within the lymph vessels, which prevent fluid from going back. So let's draw a
lymph vessel here. And a valve might look
something like this. And what this valve accomplishes
is that if fluid gets pushed that way, it'll part
the two leaves of the valve, and it will get through. But let's say that fluid
tried to come back. When it tries to
come back, it'll push the leaves of the
valve back together, and it will create an obstacle. Now this is a
really smart system, and actually, it's not only
used in your lymph vessels. You might know that it's also
used actually in the heart. You have four big
valves in the heart that operate on this exact principle. And it's also used in
veins because the pressure to push fluid through veins
is sometimes not sufficient. And so having a mechanism
to prevent backward flow is very helpful. But still you might
not be satisfied because you might
say, well, what causes the lymph to
move at all here? Why wouldn't it just
sit where it is? And there are actually two
ways that the motion begins. One is that you actually have
a little bit of smooth muscle attached to your lymphatic
vessels, and that can contract. And just by
squeezing, it'll cause motion of the fluid forwards. So that's the first mechanism
by which the motion starts. And the second is
skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle just refers to
basically all the big muscles in your body that are
under voluntary control. Think about your leg muscles,
your arm muscles, and so on. And the reason why
this does something is that just throughout the
course of your average day, you use your muscles,
you move around, you have a certain amount
of jostling in your body. And so it's
inevitable that you're going to squeeze certain parts
of your body at some times. And when you squeeze a
part of the body that has a lymph vessel like this,
it's going to start the motion. It's going to squeeze it just
like the smooth muscle did, and you'll get fluid moving
ahead in the direction that the valves allow them to. And so in addition
to the valves, which we can draw in to our diagram
here, in addition to those, there's an interesting
contraption where the lymph first enters
the lymphatic vessels. So I drew it here
is an open tube, but in reality it's closed. At least, it looks closed,
but it's porous, of course, and that's what allows
fluid to get in. Let me just draw
this a little bigger. But basically, this is where
the lymph vessel starts. And the walls of
this lymph vessel are kind of like valves
in and of themselves in that they allow
fluid to come in, but when the pressure
inside rises, it prevents fluid
from going out. So the lymph cannot go back out. So finally, let's just
look at a human body to get a sense of where
everything that we're doing fits in. So here is another ugly human. Let's quickly give
him some arms, a head. And now we can
actually show where the lymph reenters circulation. So let's say that
that's the heart. Well, you probably know that
one of the huge veins leading into the heart is the
superior vena cava. And right near the
superior vena cava, you have what are called
the subclavian veins. And you have one on the
right and one on the left. They're called subclavian
veins because they pass just under the clavicle, and it's
actually right into these that the lymph is reentered. So I'm drawing that in green so
that it corresponds with that. It's at this point that
we have very low pressure, and it's there that all
the lymph in the body goes. So that includes lymph from down
in your legs and from your arms and from your neck and so on. And it's pretty remarkable
if you think about it that all the lymph in your body
traveled up this entire path and got dumped back
into circulation there, and all of it was
without an active pump. It was all done
through this method of-- a little bit of
squeezing with smooth muscle-- but mostly, just the ingenuity
of these one-way valves that take advantage of the fact that
you're always moving around to sort of squirt the lymph
back up all the way up your body to essentially your neck.