Clinical Study Brown Fat Expresses Adiponectin in Humans

Copyright © 2013 Gianluca Iacobellis et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The presence of brown adipose tissue (BAT) in humans is unclear. Pheochromocytomas (PHEO) are rare tumors of neuroec-todermal origin which occur in 0.1-0.2 % of patients with hypertension. We sought to evaluate the presence and activity of BAT surrounding adrenal PHEO in a well-studied sample of 11 patients who were diagnosed with PHEO and then underwent adrenalectomy. Areas of white fat (WAT) and BAT surrounding PHEOwere obtained by Laser CaptureMicrodissection for analysis of uncoupling protein (UCP)-1 and adiponectin mRNA expression. Adiponectin and UCP-1 mRNA levels were significantly higher in BAT than in WAT (0.62 versus 0.15 and 362.4 versus 22.1, resp.