LOS ANGELES (Dispatches)- For women, fat usually accumulates around the hips, resulting in a pear-shaped look. In men, fat tends to build up around the abdomen, creating an apple shape. According to a new mouse study, it's healthier to be a pear than an apple.
A research team at the University of California, Riverside, has found that only male mice experienced neuroinflammation, or activation of the immune system's response in the brain, after being fed a high-fat diet. While females were unaffected, males showed low testosterone and reduced sperm count, in addition to neuroinflammation.
Clinical studies have led researchers to believe females are protected against weight gain when they are young because of ovarian estrogen. The understanding has been that women gain weight after menopause because of a precipitous drop in estrogen, resulting in a decline in health parameters, including obesity.
"We addressed this assumption by removing ovaries in young mice," said Djurdjica Coss, an associate professor of biomedical sciences in the UCR School of Medicine, who led the study. "We found that the mice proceed to gain weight when fed a high-fat diet, suggesting that ovarian hormones are indeed protective against weight gain. But we found, too, that these female mice exhibit neither neuroinflammation, nor changes in reproductive hormones, suggesting that they are protected by factors other than ovarian estrogen. This is a novel finding."
The findings, derived from the mouse study, are likely to have applications in humans, Coss added.