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Endocrine Abstracts (2016) 41 S9.2 | DOI: 10.1530/endoabs.41.S9.2

Finland.


Bone marrow adipose tissue (BMAT) fills the majority of bone marrow space in adult long bones. Despite its wide presence the functions of BMAT in normal energy metabolism, bone turnover or in disease are largely unknown. Amount of BMAT does increase with age, upon failure of hematopoietic bone marrow and in anorexia nervosa but its amount also positively correlates with that of visceral fat. Work in animal models has suggested that BMAT would share characteristics with brown adipose tissue. Our research group is interested in the metabolic activity and functions of BMAT and its role in the whole body energy metabolism. To do this, we combine modern positron emission tomography (PET) imaging and molecular biologic approaches.

In healthy subjects under fasting conditions BMAT does uptake glucose (18F-fluorodeoxy glucose, FDG) similarly to subcutaneous and slightly less than visceral adipose tissue. However, insulin stimulates the glucose uptake more than in the other fat depots during hyperinsulinemic clamp. Interestingly, in morbidly obese patients and especially in obese with type II diabetes, fasting BMAT glucose uptake was higher than in controls but it was not stimulated by insulin indicating that BMAT may become insulin resistant. In type II diabetic patients BMAT insulin sensitivity could be improved by bariatric surgery-induced weight loss or by rosiglitazone. We also found that cold stimulation does not activate glucose metabolism in BMAT as it does in brown fat. Furthermore, we did not observe any expression of brown fat marker genes in BMAT, which together with PET data indicates that human long bone BMAT does resemble brown fat. Instead, BMAT did show a distinct gene expression pattern different from subcutaneous fat.

Taken together our data demonstrates that BMAT is metabolically active, insulin sensitive and molecularly distinct fat depot that likely has important but overlooked role in whole body energy metabolism.

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