Many deleterious consequences for health of excessive fat accumulation are due to visceral fat. Browning of visceral fat is mainly cold dependent and has been proposed as a possible tool for future therapies of obesity and related disorders. In this paper, we studied the composition of mediastinal and perirenal visceral fat, collected at necropsy, of human adults that lived in Siberia, one of the coldest regions of the earth. Data showed that a consistent part of the mediastinal and perirenal fat (up to about 40%) had the morphology typical of brown adipocytes and that a relevant percentage of them (up to about 30%) also expressed the functional marker uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1). Patients living mainly outdoor had higher percentage of brown-like adipocytes with more intensely UCP1 immunoreactive cells. The presence of numerous UCP1 immunoreactive paucilocular cells, a transitional stage of transdifferentiating adipocytes, supports the idea that visceral fat can be converted to brown adipose tissue in adult humans in physiological conditions. Tyrosine hydroxylase immunoreactive noradrenergic parenchymal nerve fibers were positively correlated to the number of multilocular adipocytes in mediastinal fat, and a similar trend was also observed in the perirenal fat.
Keywords: Human brown adipocytes; Noradrenergic nerves; Paucilocular adipocytes; Uncoupling protein 1; Visceral adipose tissue.