Mice Sweating Fat Raises Prospect of Unusual Anti-Obesity Therapy
upstart writes:
Mice sweating fat raises prospect of unusual anti-obesity therapy:
The research began by studying how an immune protein called thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) influences energy metabolism in mice. The initial hypothesis was that increasing the levels of TSLP in mice could lower the animals' risk of developing diabetes.
Initially, we did not think TSLP would have any effect on obesity itself," says the study's principal investigator Taku Kambayashi. "What we wanted to find out was whether it could impact insulin resistance. We thought that the cytokine could correct Type 2 diabetes, without actually causing the mice to lose any weight."
After a month of treatment designed to increase TSLP levels the mice showed significant improvements to blood glucose. But surprisingly, the animals also dropped huge volumes of visceral fat. Even more unexpectedly, the TSLP-treated mice were losing weight while consuming up to 30 percent more food than the control mice.
So what was going on? Kambayashi says the clue was in the unusually oily coats on the TSLP-treated mice.
[...] Extracting oils from the animals' fur the researchers discovered the mice were indeed "sweating fat." The fat cells in the oils were a form of what is called sebum - a waxy substance released by glands in the skin.
Sebum secretion is generally regulated by hormones. In humans excessive hormonal activity in adolescence is known to stimulate high levels of sebum secretion leading to that infamous wave of teenage acne.
Journal Reference:
Ruth Choa, Junichiro Tohyama, Shogo Wada, et al. Thymic stromal lymphopoietin induces adipose loss through sebum hypersecretion [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abd2893)
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