The Power of Fat

http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/human-fat-cells-can-be-used-to-heal-hearts-and-joints

by mr_tyzic • 12 years ago

101 17 12 years ago

exratione• 12 years ago

A terrible byline: "Human fat cells can be used to regenerate damaged hearts and ageing joints. So should we start piling on the pounds?"

Piling on the fat is about as effective as smoking if you want a reliably slow way to shorten your lifespan by a decade or more [1] while at the same time considerably increasing your lifetime medical expenditures [2].

That visceral fat around your organs works a number on your biochemistry, increasing chronic inflammation [3] with all its detrimental consequences. That is bad enough but other unfortunate and more poorly understood changes take place in metabolism when you eat a very high calorie diet consistently, of the sort needed to sustain a lot of fat tissue, pushing nutrient sensing mechanisms into overload. [4]

There is magical thinking everywhere when laypeople talk about medical technologies. But this fat-related example is particularly egregious.

[1] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-07/iaft-sfl07121...

[2] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-12/dumc-hcc12161...

[3] http://www.houstonmethodist.org/body.cfm?id=495&action=detai...

[4] http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10863-009-9229-3

barrkel• 12 years ago

The article is actually about fatty deposits containing stem cells - the benefits come from using stem cells.

That's if the automated summary linked to elsewhere is to be believed.

Long articles prompt people to react to headlines rather than the substance of the article. That's why I suggested that a summary was needed, yet was biffed in the head multiple times for.

babuskov3• 12 years ago

I really don't understand why, perhaps people were mad that you were complaining instead of providing the summary for them ;)

One of the reasons why I enjoy HN is that I can read comments first, which works very fast on any device, does not load 20+ javascript and CSS files and is surely not going to make my browser crawl to a halt. I read comments for almost everything, but only hit the original site once in 20 times or less.

This article was trending and there were no comments, so I figured I would read it, and if it's any good, provide TLDR for the rest of us. It's a way of thanking all the others who provided useful comments to me in the past.

BTW, I did not down-vote you, I actually went to read it and provide TLDR. I guess you were just too eager and could not wait till I complete reading it :)

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

(That's not what a byline is - that's usually location, date, and name of the author. This is just a subtitle.)

It's linkbaity, sure, but the story is a good deal more complex, unsurprisingly so as the author is 'an associate professor of medicine and pharmacology at the University of Illinois.' You should be aware that titles and subtitles are very often written by editors rather than authors, and the editor's goal is to draw and retain people's attention. One way to do that is to use a counter-intuitive proposition as bait to draw in the reader.

logicallee• 12 years ago

I clicked through and after reading that subtitle ("Human fat cells can be used to regenerate damaged hearts and ageing joints. So should we start piling on the pounds?") concluded that McDonald's paid for the article and closed it.

If McDonald's didn't pay for it, it shouldn't be written as if they had.

babuskov3• 12 years ago

TLDR: Scientists discovered that human fat extracted by liposuction contains adult stem cells. Those could be used to repair heart and damaged joints, but since these particular doctors are cardiologists, they want to repair hearts. It is still not ready for general usage and needs more testing and experimenting.

You should not try to get fat to create a reserve of stem cells.

_Adam• 12 years ago

This seems like an obvious conclusion; our bodies are full of stem cells but that doesn't mean they're used for repair. What I would expect them to prove is that the body is actually using fat stem cells for repair of other organs.

I didn't read the whole article (long, information sparse), so I don't know if they came to this conclusion.

babuskov3• 12 years ago

They are currently focused on extracting stem cells from the fat and using those to repair tissue by injecting the extracted cells directly to the heart.

There are complications, because safe way to do it is not very precise and stem cells would not attach to the heart. Trying it multiple times would increase chances of infection, which is not good for recovering heart, etc.

zaroth• 12 years ago

[Not quite TLDR, but call it Cliff Notes... most of this is directly quoted, but I have done some editorializing.]

In 2001, some researchers at UCLA discovered that fat cells (adipose) contain an abundance of adult stem cells. Separate out the mature fat cells and the remaining cells, which they called PLA, can be coaxed into forming bone and cartilage.

Jalees Rehman and Keith March at Indiana University decided to see if they could use these cells to repair the heart and grow new blood vessels. Their "goal was to convert fat stem cells from liposuction aspirates into cardiovascular cells, such as cardiomyocytes or endothelial cells that form the lining of all blood vessels."

Over the course of the next year, although they had a few cultures that did seem to behave like cardiac cells, they couldn't reliably produce them.

The team learned of reports that adult bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells released growth factors that nourished and accelerated the regeneration of neighbouring cells. Researchers were increasingly calling these stem cells ‘stromal cells’, from the Latin ‘stroma’ for mattress or covering, to signify their support function.

They decided to try growing PLA cells side by side with endothelial cells and studying what occurred. When they added PLA cells to the gels, the growth of the blood-vessel-like tubes increased several-fold. "Analysing the PLA genes and proteins they produced, we found not one, but a multitude of factors that promoted survival, regeneration and growth of blood vessels. Synergy between all the factors likely explained why they were so effective. These growth factors not only activated the growth of endothelial cells, they also made endothelial cells more resilient to stress. In the aftermath of this work, I decided to rename PLA cells ‘adipose stromal cells’ (ASCs), to emphasise the fact that it was their ‘stromal’ or caretaker function that aided in their ability to form blood vessels."

Especially important was the discovery that ASCs did not just blindly churn out growth factors. Their productivity was regulated by the cell’s ability to sense oxygen. When placed in a low-oxygen environment, the ASCs doubled or tripled production of factors necessary for the growth of blood vessels. Since heart and limb muscle tissues of patients with blood vessel blockages suffer from low oxygen levels; implanting ASCs that released therapeutic molecules based on oxygen levels seemed almost too good to be true.

They did a preliminary test on mice, and met with success. (why does it always work on mice?!) They cut off blood supply to the lower parts of the legs of experimental mice. Half the mice then received an injection of human ASCs into the leg muscle. We observed an astonishing recovery of blood flow through new blood vessels in ASC-treated mice, but not our controls.

Since then, clinical trials are proceeding somewhat rapidly, in part due to FDA exemptions for treatment with one’s own cells, as long as modifications are no more than minor and cells are re-injected during the same procedure. "The irony is that the less effort such clinics spend on processing and characterising the cells they are injecting into patients, the more likely they are to get away with it." These exemptions may encourage treating with under-processed cells, since too much processing voids the exemption, but it remains to be seen if theres low-hanging fruit here, or if scientists will have to work much harder to refine the processing in order to see actual clinical benefit from injecting ASC.

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

why does it always work on mice?!

Mice are cheap, live fairly short lives (a big plus if you're studying hereditary things), easy to handle, genetically quite similar to us, and research mice have been bred to the point of near0uniformity in genetic terms, making for greater reproducibility. Additionally, there are transgenci mice that can express human genes, and mice with no immune systems which are ideal for studying disease.

Centigonal• 12 years ago

research mice have been bred to the point of near[-]uniformity in genetic terms, making for greater reproducibility.

Doesn't that also introduce a bias toward experimental treatments that happen to work well with the genetics of research mice, but not those of other mice, vs. treatments that don't work well on research mice, but that mice with different genes respond well to?

In other words, would treatment that works really well for research mice but not the majority of other mice be able to make it through mouse trials without anyone finding that out?

Are there different lines of mice to mitigate that? Is that kind of genetic fluke uncommon?

jrabone2• 12 years ago

I think OP meant, "Why does the experiment always succeed on mice", not "Why do we perform experiments on mice".

samstave• 12 years ago

I would love to see human adult stem cells used to repair some organ coupled with a transfusion of "young blood" as well to see the effect on the growth, overall.

swombat• 12 years ago

An authentic scientific thriller! Shows the excitement of patient research met with failure after failure and, eventually, a cautious success, followed by learning something important and opening up further avenues of research.

Lean entrepreneurs take note! This is your job too!

The Power of Fat

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