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Novel concept of ‘metabolic elasticity’ offers new screening strategy for metabolic health; provides potential means of curbing metabolic decline in ageing and obesity

Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School, in collaboration with counterparts from Columbia University, have developed a new framework to measure metabolic health. The concept of “metabolic elasticity” paints a more comprehensive picture of how the body reacts to changes in the availability of food and how efficiently the food is converted into energy. Their findings, published in Cell Metabolism, provide novel perspectives to develop new ways of screening for metabolic health.

While it has been well-established that our metabolism slows with age, current measurements to assess the deterioration typically capture a single state and do not reflect the changes that occur in the digestive process. To illustrate, when an individual goes without food, their metabolism slows down. When they resume eating, their metabolic rate increases. The body has to constantly adapt its metabolism accordingly—from being at rest, to activation and then back to its original state.

To take into account such transitions, Duke-NUS scientists and their collaborators from Columbia University tracked changes in key metabolic organs across a cycle of at-rest, fasting and re-feeding. They found that the faster the body can reduce and subsequently restore its metabolic parameters such as levels of glucose, insulin (a hormone that helps the body turn food into energy) and fats, the better its metabolic elasticity is. This in turn, sheds light on the overall health of one’s metabolism.  

“Our study introduces metabolic elasticity as an effective means of assessing and screening for metabolic health. We foresee this concept of elasticity extending to conditions beyond ageing and obesity, including diabetes, exercise, cancer, and many others. We expect that all of these conditions can be reframed as dynamic and elastic processes rather than solely as snapshots of single metabolic states or transitions,” said first author Zhou Qiuzhong, a senior research fellow from the Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disorders Programme at Duke-NUS. Read more>>

Source: https://www.duke-nus.edu.sg/allnews/media-releases/metabolic-elasticity