WIKIMEDIA, LUCASMCORSOScientists have been searching for chemicals or conditions that can stimulate the activity of energy-burning brown fat as a potential means of treating obesity. Adult humans, unlike babies and some animals, don’t have too much brown fat to work with, however. Now, researchers in Texas have found that humans—victims of extreme burn trauma, in particular—can actually convert white fat into brown fat, a phenomenon previously witnessed only in animals and in vitro models.
“We think in these patients who have lost much of their skin, which normally helps keep us warm, white fat is turning into brown fat in an effort to increase the ability of the body to produce heat,” Labros Sidossis, a researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston who led the study, published in Cell Metabolism August 4, told Science.
Sidossis and his colleauges studied 42 severely burned children and six adult burn patients. Compared to healthy controls, the patients’ white adipose tissue appeared more like brown fat, with an increase in the presence of lipid droplets, rod-shape mitochondria, and a brown fat marker, UCP1. “Furthermore, in patients biopsied sequentially after burn, we show a gradual decline in cell size and an ...
