Evaluation of Endothelial and Vascular Functions in Obese Patients (FUENVASOB)

The primary objective of the present study will be to evaluate, in obese patients, the blood flow response in the femoral artery in response to passive limb movements, taken as a biomarker of a possible limitation of the peripheral vascular-endothelial-microvascular function. The values will be compared with those obtained in normal subjects, in patients with cardiovascular (Gilford \& Richardson 2017) or respiratory diseases (Ives et al. 2020), and in healthy subjects subjected to bed rest (Zuccarelli et al. 2020). The data of the recruited obese patients will be obtained at the beginning and the end of the standard rehabilitation period (including calorie reduction interventions, physical exercise, and psychological counseling) conducted over 3 weeks at the Division of Auxology, Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Piancavallo, Italy. A secondary objective will be to evaluate any changes following the rehabilitation program on the patients' endothelial-peripheral-vascular-microvascular function. The data obtained will also be evaluated in comparison with hematochemical and molecular indices for evaluating the endothelial function, as well as with standard parameters for the overall functional evaluation of the oxidative function and the ability to sustain exercise ("peak" O2 consumption during exercise, thresholds anaerobic diseases.