City of Hope National Medical Center – It’s no secret that our waistlines often expand in middle age, but the problem isn’t strictly cosmetic. Belly fat accelerates aging and slows down metabolism, increasing our risk for developing diabetes, heart problems and other chronic diseases.
Exactly how age transforms a six pack into a softer stomach, however, is murky.
Now preclinical research by City of Hope has uncovered the cellular culprit behind age-related abdominal fat, providing new insights into why our midsections widen with middle age.
Published today in Science, the findings suggest a novel target for future therapies to prevent belly flab and extend our healthy lifespans.
“People often lose muscle and gain body fat as they age—even when their body weight remains the same,” said Qiong (Annabel) Wang, Ph.D., the study’s co-corresponding author and an associate professor of molecular and cellular endocrinology at City of Hope’s Arthur Riggs Diabetes & Metabolism Research Institute.
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“We discovered aging triggers the arrival of a new type of adult stem cell and enhances the body’s massive production of new fat cells, especially around the belly.”
In collaboration with the UCLA laboratory co-corresponding author Xia Yang, Ph.D., the scientists conducted a series of mouse experiments later validated on human cells. Wang and her colleagues focused on white adipose tissue (WAT), the fatty tissue responsible for age-related weight gain.
While it’s well-known that fat cells grow larger with age, the scientists suspected that WAT also expanded by producing new fat cells, meaning it may have an unlimited potential to grow.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers focused on adipocyte progenitor cells (APCs), a group of stem cells in WAT that evolve into fat cells.
The City of Hope team first transplanted APCs from young and older mice into a second group of young mice …
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