Washington, May 3 (UNI) Good news for those spending hours in the neighbourhood gym, sweating like a pig, as they can get similar effects by catching a cold! Researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center have uncovered a fat brown hormone, which increases sharply during exercising, as well as in cold.
The findings came from the first comprehensive study of fat-controlling hormones (known as lipokines). “This is a whole new area in research on exercise metabolism, and we seem to have found another mechanism by which exercise can have beneficial effects,” says Laurie Goodyear, PhD, Head of Joslin’s Section on Integrative Physiology and Metabolism and senior author on a report on the work published in Cell Metabolism.
Experiments in both humans and mice showed that levels of one lipokine, with the unwieldy name of 12,13-diHOME, climbed significantly in exercise, unlike the levels of other lipokines analysed. The study followed up on research published last year in joint work with the lab of Joslin’s Yu-Hua Tseng, PhD, Science Daily reported on Tuesday.
This collaboration explored the release of lipokines from brown fat, which can burn energy in people or other mammals exposed to cold. In both humans and mice, the researchers demonstrated that the 12,13-diHome molecule was released from brown fat during cold exposure and offered beneficial metabolic effects.
“We found it very striking that when we then analysed lipokines in exercise, the same lipokine that increased with cold also increased with exercise,” said Dr Goodyear, an Associate Professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
“It seems to be the first example of a hormone released from brown fat that might regulate some of the metabolic effects of exercise,” she noted, adding that further work revealed that lipokine acts as a signal to boost the use of fatty acids as fuels.
“The more knowledge we have about exercise and how it works, the better we can understand how to combat metabolic disease,” she said. (agencies)
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