MRI scans reveal heart fat risks, helping prevent and treat cardiac diseases early.
Fat around the heart is something most people rarely think about, yet it can tell us a lot about overall heart health. Researchers at the University of Virginia (UVA) Health are working on a new way to look at this fat and what it might mean for preventing serious heart problems. The method involves magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), used for analyzing the fat surrounding the heart, called epicardial adipose tissue. This technique might help doctors spot risks early and improve treatments for conditions like coronary artery disease, irregular heartbeats, and heart failure.
Dr. Frederick H. Epstein and his team have been leading this research, using MRI to figure out what kind of fat is around the heart. This isn’t just about measuring how much fat is there; it’s about understanding its makeup. Different types of fat—like saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fats—can act very differently in the body. By analyzing these variations, the team hopes to figure out who might be at higher risk for heart issues before they start showing symptoms.
Dr. Amit R. Patel, a cardiologist involved in the study, explains why this matters. When the fat around the heart changes in unhealthy ways, it can release harmful substances that damage the heart muscle. This can lead to serious problems. The goal is to find out whether changing the makeup of this fat, through diet, exercise, or medication, might reduce some of these risks. If successful, this approach could provide a new tool to slow the progression of heart disease, which remains a leading cause of death worldwide.
Healthy epicardial fat plays a protective role in cushioning the heart and supporting its function. But in people with obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, or other risk factors, this fat can accumulate too much and become inflamed. When that happens, it’s no longer protective and can even contribute to disease. By using MRI, researchers can now see and analyze this fat without surgery, offering a noninvasive way to get important information about a patient’s heart health.
Getting clear images of this fat is no easy task. The heart and lungs are constantly moving, making it hard to capture detailed snapshots. The UVA team overcame this by developing advanced imaging techniques that work within the short span of a single breath hold. They also created computational methods to sift through the noisy data and focus on the specific signatures of different types of fat. One of the researchers, graduate student Jack Echols, was instrumental in refining these methods.
Initial testing of the MRI approach has shown promising results. In a study of patients who were obese and had suffered heart attacks, the fat around their hearts contained high levels of saturated fatty acids. These findings suggest that analyzing this fat could become a valuable way to predict heart disease risks and outcomes. Dr. Patel believes that this deeper understanding of heart fat could eventually lead to new treatment strategies tailored to the individual needs of patients.
The research isn’t just about identifying problems. It’s also about finding solutions. If doctors can determine what makes some heart fat turn unhealthy, they might be able to guide patients toward steps that can reverse these changes. This could include adjustments to lifestyle, like improved eating habits and regular physical activity, or the use of specific medications. The long-term hope is that this MRI technique could help prevent heart disease altogether in some cases by catching problems early.
While the technology is still in its early stages, the UVA team has already tested it on both lab models and a small group of human patients. The results so far are encouraging, and the researchers are optimistic about its potential to improve heart care. With further development, this method could become a routine part of heart health assessments, providing doctors with a clearer picture of what’s happening inside their patients’ bodies and how best to help them.
In the end, this work is about finding new ways to understand and tackle heart disease, one of the most common and deadly health issues of our time. By focusing on the fat around the heart, the UVA researchers are opening up new possibilities for prevention and treatment that could save lives in the years to come.
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New MRI method may predict heart disease risk by analyzing heart fat
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