A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan showed the first "brown fat" to be seen in a living adult; the research could lead to new methods for combating obesity-related diseases.
Brown fat can use its energy to burn calories, this could help researchers create better methods for preventing and treating obesity and diabetes, a University of Warwick news release reported.
"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," Doctor Thomas Barber, from the Department of Metabolic and Vascular Health at Warwick Medical School, said in the news release.
"This particular proof of concept is key, as it allows us to pursue MRI techniques in future assessments and gather this required information," he said.
The study highlights the benefits of using MRI scans instead of positron emission tomography (PET) to make their findings. While PETs can look at brown fat it is constrained to certain limits such as "signal variability from a changing environmental temperature," the news release reported.
MRIs have the ability to show brown fat even if it is not active. This could help the researchers determine exactly where brown fat can be found on the body, this could lead to future therapies that work to activate 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 said.
