It is safe to say that everyone accepts obesity as a problem! Indeed worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980 and in 2014 there were 600 million adults who were obese worldwide. Obesity increases the risk of many diseases with, for example, many obese individuals suffering from metabolic conditions such as type 2 diabetes. While excess fat accumulation is clearly negative, in recent years the storage location of this fat has also been shown to be of considerable importance. When fat storage in the “usual” depots, which to a degree is perfectly healthy, is no longer possible fats spill over and are stored ectopically in organs such as liver, heart and skeletal muscle. This ectopic fat is now known to be implicit in the metabolic dysfunction of obesity, amongst other conditions. This invited session will focus on the accumulation of fat within skeletal muscle, its negative “lipotoxic” effects and strategies (such as exercise) to reduce the amount of fat within muscle.

Bret Goodpaster, Patrick Schrauwen, Stuart Gray, Christelle Guillet

This session will bring together researchers from the USA, Netherlands and France who have considerable expertise in this area.

The first speaker is Professor Patrick Schrauwen from Maastricht University who will tell us what skeletal muscle lipotoxicity is and what it does. In his talk Patrick will discuss the relationship between skeletal muscle fat accumulation and both insulin resistance and mitochondrial dysfunction. He will also introduce some new research showing that lipid droplet dynamics may play an important role in the negative effects of skeletal muscle fat accumulation.

After this we will have Professor Bret Goodpaster from Sandford Burnham Medical Research Institute who will tell us about the role of specific types of fat in this lipotoxic effect and how some of the beneficial effects of exercise may be due to changes in skeletal muscle fat storage.

The final speaker in this invited session is Dr Christelle Guillet from Université Clermont who will tell us about some fascinating new research from her lab which has shown that fat accumulation within skeletal muscle can have a negative effect on muscle protein synthesis and how this may contribute to the loss of muscle mass with age, termed sarcopenia.

The invited session [IS-PM13] Skeletal muscle lipotoxicity; Should we be interested? will start 16:20 Thursday 25th June in Lecture room “Kuben”.

Post by Dr Stuart Gray
Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences
University od Aberdeen