Artificial intelligence-enabled clinical phenotyping of human brown fat.

Artificial intelligence-enabled analysis reveals that higher brown adipose tissue activity is linked to lower prevalence of cardiometabolic and psychiatric diseases in humans.

• Why it matters: Understanding the full health impact of brown adipose tissue (BAT) is limited by the lack of high-throughput methods to quantify its activity, hindering potential therapeutic strategies.
• What they did: The study used big data from 101,243 patients and machine learning to semi-automatically quantify BAT activity in about 8,700 individuals, examining its associations with various health parameters and medication use.
• The result: Higher BAT activity correlates with better glycaemic, lipid, inflammatory, and cardiac indices, and the angiotensin receptor blocker losartan was shown to increase brown adipocyte activity, suggesting potential for drug repurposing.