Abstract
The lung tissue serves the main function of gas diffusion. Diffusion for oxygen at alveolar level can be estimated at some 6 x 10 8 liters over a life span, a tremendous amount, requiring specific morphofunctional adaptations of the lung tissue. The air-blood barrier displays in fact two features optimising gas diffusion: it is very thin, about 0.1-0-5 µm due to its delicate structure and furthermore the extravascular space reflects a condition of minimum hydration, in fact one may think of the pulmonary interstitium as a functionally "dry" tissue space. The minimum amount of interstitial water depends upon the dynamic equilibrium established between fluid filtration through a low permeability microvascular district and a powerful lymphatic drainage. Such equilibrium results in a subatmospheric hydraulic pressure of the interstitial space of the order of- 10 cmH2O (Miserocchi et al. 1990).
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References
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Miserocchi, G. (2003). The Pulmonary Interstitium: an Introductory Review. In: Pequignot, JM., Gonzalez, C., Nurse, C.A., Prabhakar, N.R., Dalmaz, Y. (eds) Chemoreception. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 536. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9280-2_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9280-2_18
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