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Prevalence and Activation of Human Brown Adipose Tissue
Author(s) -
Gifford Aliya,
Walker Ronald,
Welch E,
Towse Theodore
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.29.1_supplement.995.4
Subject(s) - brown adipose tissue , adipose tissue , medicine , nuclear medicine , cohort , metabolic activity , physiology , energy expenditure
The role of brown adipose tissue (BAT) in human lipid metabolism and whole‐body energy expenditure is not well understood. To study BAT in humans it is necessary to reliably measure the quantitative properties of BAT. The purpose of this study is to assess the volume and activity of BAT prospectively using PET in a cohort of healthy male and female adult humans.Twenty‐five subjects (10 male), aged 21 to 41 years, with a BMI of 20.15 to 31.48 kg/m 2 were scanned on a GE Discovery STE PET/CT scanner using the radioactive tracer 18 F‐FDG. Each subject underwent two PET‐CT scans on two separate days, once after two hours of cold exposure (16°C) and once after two hours of thermoneutral exposure (24°C). BAT activation was observed on the PET scans of 19 subjects after cold exposure. The PET scans for two representative subjects from this dataset are shown in Fig 1. The resulting PET and CT values (mean ± 95% CI) from the clavicular BAT depots for these two subjects are listed in Table 1.The results of this study show the ability to measure the presence of brown adipose tissue in healthy adults with a variety of ages and BMI levels. Although it is likely this method does not capture the entire volume of BAT or the full degree of activation for a specific subject, this method can detect activated BAT in adult humans in an automated fashion. One advantage of this research over existing studies is that the same subjects are scanned after exposure to both thermoneutral and cold conditions, which enables a comparison of the images between temperatures. Funding 1R21DK096282 from NIDDK/NIH & UL1 TR000445 from NCATS/NIHCold Exposure BAT Values Thermoneutral Exposure BAT ValuesPET Standardized Uptake Value [SUV] CT Hounsfield Units [HU] PET Standardized Uptake Value [SUV] CT Hounsfield Units [HU] BAT Volume [cm 3 ] Subject 1 5.2 ± 0.1 ‐49.5 ± 0.9 0.6 ± 0.0 ‐71.1 ± 1.3 23.7 Subject 2 3.4 ± 0.1 ‐64.1 ± 1.7 0.4 ± 0.0 ‐93.2 ± 2.4 8.5