At a Moscow congress on obesity and metabolic disorders, specialists discussed why people with the same body mass index can experience different symptoms and presented approaches to studying cells in adipose tissue.
Russian Academy of Sciences academician Natalia Mokrysheva said obesity can manifest differently from one person to another. With the same body mass index, one person may report joint pain, weakness and blood-sugar fluctuations, while another may have few noticeable health complaints. She also cited poor diet and insufficient physical activity as environmental factors that contribute to obesity.
Konstantin Kulebyakin, deputy director for research at Moscow State University’s Medical Research and Education Institute, described adipose tissue as an organ with several physiological functions, including an endocrine role. He said its volume can change substantially.
The congress also featured scMoses, a tool for analyzing single-cell RNA-sequencing data. Vadim Chechekhin, a senior lecturer at Moscow State University, said the tool performed more accurately than seven other automated cell-annotation systems in a comparison. The results he cited showed an advantage of at least 2% over the next-best method, scANVI, and more than 10% over CellTypist.
Petr Tyurin-Kuzmin, an associate professor at Moscow State University, proposed that some obesity-associated metabolic disorders may be linked to the relative proportions of adipocyte subtypes. In his view, future treatments could target specific cell subtypes. This was a research hypothesis discussed at the congress.