Harvard Medical School

June 2, 2008

In Print

Graham Ramsay

Big Difference Emerges Between Body Fats
Visceral fat, the accumulation of white fat around the internal organs, has long been associated with insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and atherosclerosis. But new research from C. Ronald Kahn, Thien Tran, and colleagues suggests that the location of fat is not the only factor. An experiment that employed fat transplant surgery to explore the role of location on the behavior of subcutaneous and visceral fats showed that visceral fat and subcutaneous fat have different intrinsic, location-independent properties. While visceral fat seems to have ill effects on health, subcutaneous fat plays a protective role against metabolic disease.

Upcoming

The Harvard/Paul F. Glenn Symposium on Aging

Monday, June 23
9 a.m.

Speakers:

•Thomas Rando
•Gary B. Ruvkun
•Scott Lowe
•Heidi Tassenbaum
•Jan Vijg
•Richard Miller
•Keith Blackwell
•Toren Finkel
•Leonard Guarente
•David Sinclair

Spotlight

Harvard Medical School Receives Major NIH Grant for Galvanizing Translational Science
HMS was one of 14 institutions in the country to receive a Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health. The goal is to transform the infrastructure for bringing biomedical discoveries to fruition in improving human health.

Student Scene

Graham Ramsay

Keeping Patients First
When an orthopedic procedure did not go as planned, Joseph Ladapo drew a lesson on the importance of seeing the patient’s perspective while delivering care.