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Regional fat depots linked with calcified plaque in Black diabetics
5 March 2010
MedWire News: Pericardial adipose tissue is associated with calcified atherosclerotic plaque in the coronary arteries and infrarenal aorta in African Americans with Type 2 diabetes, study findings show.
However the factors that mediate these associations remain to be identified, as do the mechanisms underlying ethnic differences in organ-specific fat depots and atherosclerosis.
The study, by Barry Freedman (Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA) and colleagues, used data from the African– American Diabetes Heart Study to assess relationships between regional fat depots and calcified atherosclerotic plaque.
The subjects were 422 African Americans with Type 2 diabetes who were assessed using computed tomography. The mean volume of pericardial adipose tissue was 85.3 cm3/45 mm and visceral adipose tissue was 174.9 cm3/15 mm.
After adjusting for potential confounders, there was a strong positive association between pericardial adipose tissue and both the presence and quantity of coronary artery calcified plaque.
In addition, pericardial adipose tissue was significantly associated with the quantity of infrarenal aortic calcified plaque.
Freedman et al say their findings confirm and extend those from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, which demonstrated a link between pericardial fat volume and coronary artery calcification in both European American and African American individuals.
“It will be important to determine whether ethnic differences in the relationships between adipose tissue depots and regional calcified plaque contribute to observed ethnic differences in plaque mass, with African Americans having less calcified plaque relative to European Americans,” they conclude in the journal Obesity.
“The factors that mediate the relationship between peripheral adipose tissue and atherosclerosis remain to be identified.”
