Rutgers Health researchers have made discoveries about brown fat that may open a new path to helping people stay physically fit as they age. A team from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School found that mice lacking a specific gene developed an unusually potent form of brown fat tissue that expanded lifespan and increased exercise capacity by roughly 30%. The team is working on a drug that could mimic these effects in humans.
“Exercise capacity diminishes as you get older, and to have a technique that could enhance exercise performance would be very beneficial for healthful aging,” said Stephen Vatner, university professor and director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute in the medical school’s Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine and senior author of the study in Aging Cell. “This mouse model performs exercise better than their normal littermates.”
Unlike white fat, which stores energy, brown fat burns calories and helps regulate body temperature. This study revealed brown fat also plays a crucial role in exercise capacity by improving blood flow to muscles during physical activity. The genetically modified mice produced unusually high amounts of active brown fat and showed about 30% better exercise performance than normal mice, both in speed and time to exhaustion. To read the full story.