According to a recent study, the very first MRI scan to show 'brown fat' in a living adult could prove to be a crucial step towards a new assortment of therapies to supplement the fight against diabetes and obesity.
Researchers from Warwick Medical School and University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) based method to discover and corroborate the existence of brown adipose tissue in a living adult.
Brown fat has become a popular topic for scientists and researchers alike due to its capability to utilize energy and burn calories, helping to keep weight in check. Understanding the brown fat tissue and how it can be employed to such ends is of growing interest in the search to help people suffering from obesity or at a high risk of developing diabetes.
"This is an exciting area of study that requires further research and discovery. The potential is there for us to develop safe and effective ways of activating this brown fat to promote weight loss and increase energy expenditure -- but we need more data to be able to get to that point," explained Dr. Thomas Barber, from the Department of Metabolic and Vascular Health at Warwick Medical School.
"This particular proof of concept is key, as it allows us to pursue MRI techniques in future assessments and gather this required information."
The study, recently published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, describes and highlights the benefits of using MRI scans over the contemporary method of positron emission tomography (PET). Even though PET does show brown fat activity, it is subject to a number of limitations and restrictions including the difficulty of signal inconsistency from a changing environmental temperature.
Furthermore, unlike the PET data which only displays activity, the MRI can show brown fat content whether active or not, offering a detailed insight into where it can be found in the adult body. Such access to this sort of information could prove critical in the development of future therapies that aim to activate deposits of brown fat.
"The MRI allows us to distinguish between the brown fat, and the more well-known white fat that people associate with weight gain, due to the different water to fat ratio of the two tissue types. We can use the scans to highlight what we term 'regions of interest' that can help us to build a picture of where the brown fat is located," Barber noted.
With the proof of concept now completed, the next phase of the research is to further authenticate this technique across a larger group of adults.
