In our body we can find different types of fats, one of them is brown fat or brown fat : a type of adipose tissue that is metabolically very active and uses energy to generate heat. In general, brown fat is had when we are children and we lose it with age.
A new study of 52,000 people shows that this type of fat can protect us from disease: those with detectable brown fat were less likely than their peers to suffer from heart and metabolic conditions ranging from type 2 diabetes to artery disease coronary arteries, which develop when the main blood vessels supplying the heart become damaged or damaged.
The largest study
In collaboration with Heiko Schoder and Andreas Wibmer at Memorial Sloan Kettering, the researchers reviewed 130,000 PET scans of more than 52,000 patients and found the presence of brown fat in nearly 10 percent of the people.
Several common and chronic diseases were less common among people with detectable brown fat . For example, only 4.6 percent had type 2 diabetes, compared to 9.5 percent of people who had no detectable brown fat. Similarly, 18.9 percent had abnormal cholesterol, compared to 22.2 percent in those without brown fat.
In addition, the study revealed three more conditions for which people with brown fat are at lower risk: hypertension, congestive heart failure, and coronary artery disease – links that had not been seen in previous studies.
The study, by far the largest of its kind in humans , confirms and extends the health benefits of brown fat suggested by previous studies.