Wolfgang Miesbach: Can Losartan Activate Brown Fat? – Nature Study Explores New Therapeutic Link
Wolfgang Miesbach, Head of Hemostasis/Hemophilia Center at Medical Clinic 2 at University Hospital Frankfurt, shared a post on LinkedIn about a recent article by Nicolás Gómez-Banoy et al, published in Nature, adding:
“The fat that may protect: brown fat linked to less diabetes, heart disease and depression in 100,000 patients and can a blood pressure drug switch on brown fat?
A study published this week in Nature used routine 18F-FDG-PET–CT scans from a large cancer centre to ask what detectable brown adipose tissue (BAT) means clinically:
8,897 of 101,243 patients had BAT.
Compared with propensity-matched BAT-negative controls, they had markedly lower odds of type 2 diabetes (OR 0.42) and chronic ischaemic heart disease (OR 0.53).
An unbiased screen of 511 diagnoses showed associations beyond cardiometabolic disease. Depression (OR 0.68), anxiety and sleep disorders were also less frequent.
BAT-positive patients had better glycaemic and lipid profiles, less left-ventricular remodelling, lower transaminases and lower neutrophil and platelet counts.
Prescription data recovered known BAT inhibitors (β-blockers, SSRIs) and identified angiotensin receptor blockers as positively associated.
Losartan increased UCP1 expression in brown adipocytes via PPARγ, independently of AT1R, and raised energy expenditure in mice.
This is a retrospective, single-centre cohort of cancer patients (77% women), so causality and direction remain open.
BAT-positive patients also had lower vertebral T-scores.
The losartan doses used in cells and mice exceed clinical exposure.”
Title: Artificial intelligence-enabled clinical phenotyping of human brown fat
Authors: Nicolás Gómez-Banoy, Jorge A. Barrero, Luiza Rachel Pinheiro de Carvalho, Caroline S. Jiang, Tara Doma Lama, Nakul Karandikar, Mascha Koenen, Tiffany Lam, Kaja Plucińska, Ksenia Morozova, Stephanie Chahwan, Gustavo Barraza, Burcin Agridag Ucpinar, Jennifer E. Liu, Rohit Sharma, Daniel Lafontaine, Heiko Schöder, Paul Cohen
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