Heat May Melt Away White Fat
upstart writes:
Applying heat locally activates beige fat in mice and humans, and could become an approach to tackle obesity, a study published today (March 4) in Cell suggests.
"Overall, they suggest a fascinating and very easy to translate observation, by applying that mild heat you might activate thermogenic adipocytes. But in humans the situation is definitely more complicated," Siegfried Ussar, an obesity researcher at Helmholtz Munich, Germany, who was not involved in the study, tells The Scientist. "It will be interesting to see how that translates to humans, because the nature of the cell types is still controversial plus the impact on the blood flow might be different."
[...] Adipose tissue comes in three colors: white, brown and beige. While white fat specializes in storing lipid and expands during obesity, brown fat is thermogenic, turning energy into heat. Beige fat is the middleman: beige fat cells are located within white fat and are indistinguishable from them, unless they undergo a process called browning. After browning, beige fat burns energy and produces heat. "We want to understand how we can activate beige fat to prevent or treat obesity," Xinran Ma, an endocrinologist at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China, who co-authored the new study, tells The Scientist.
Previous research by other groups had sought to induce browning through various stimuli, including cold treatment and the activation of beta-adrenergic signaling. In the present study, the researchers used a different stimulus: heat, applied just to a region thought to harbor beige fat. The researchers used nanoparticles, which they injected into white fat found around the groin of mice. When exposed to near-infrared light, the nanoparticles heat up the tissue around them to about 41C. And when the researchers induced this temperature for 10 minutes in mice, they observed increased heat production in the area after 12 hours using thermal imaging-an indication that at least some of the area's beige fat had browned.
The researchers then tested local hyperthermia therapy in humans by applying a heat source of 41C to fat deposits around the neck and the shoulders, where beige fat is thought to be found in humans. Again, internal heat production in the area increased, and remained elevated for two hours after the external heat source was removed, based on thermal imaging. From that, the authors concluded that local hyperthermia could induce thermogenesis in humans by activating beige adipocytes.
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