Introduction: Overweight status should not be considered merely an aesthetic concern; rather, it can incur health risks since it may trigger a cascade of events that produce further fat tissue through altered levels of circulating signaling molecules.
Methods: We decided to investigate the influence of overweight individuals' sera on in vitro MSC proliferation and differentiation.
Results: We observed that in vitro incubation of bone marrow stromal cells with the sera of overweight individuals promotes the adipogenic differentiation of MSCs while partially impairing proper osteogenesis.
Conclusions: These results, which represent a pilot study, might suggest that becoming overweight triggers further weight gains by promoting a bias in the differentiation potential of MSCs toward adipogenesis. The circulating factors involved in this phenomenon remain to be determined, since the great majority of the well known pro-inflammatory cytokines and adipocyte-secreted factors we investigated did not show relevant modifications in overweight serum samples compared with controls.