Obesity or corpulence or more than average fatness is regarded as one the greatest adversities in a human life and people are found to apply lots of ways (even innovative!) to shed this. But the recent discovery regarding how the body creates brown fat, the cells that burn white fat and turns it into body heat, under the auspices of Bruce M. Spiegelman of Harvard Medical School, is going to add a new chapter. This discovery is regarding the natural system by which brown fat cells are generated from their precursors.

Has Dr. Spiegelman used this system? Oh! Yes. It is basically a pair of proteins that switch on the brown fat cell’s distinctive genes — to convert both mouse and human skin cells into brown fat cells. Have you got it? Let’s delve into brown fat cells before we do proceed any further. These cells are found to have a very different role from the better-known white fat cells. While the white cells store fat, the brown cells burn it off as heat and babies are known to contain a large number of brown fat to help keep warm.

It is to be noted that until April 2009, biologists were going on with the notion that the brown fat quickly disappeared and was not found in adults. But it was Dr. Sven Enerback of the University of Goteborg in Sweden along with others, who for the first time reported that some brown fat tissue persisted in adults, raising the possibility that if the cells could be made more active, a person might burn off more fat.

The same researcher has now found that the zinc finger protein, in tandem with a second protein produced in muscle cells, is the master switch for brown fat cells and will also convert skin cells into brown fat, although this is not the process nature intended. This master switch has been used by him to convert mouse skin cells to brown fat cells, which appear to work as estimated when transplanted into normal mice.

He has used this master switch to convert mouse skin cells to brown fat cells, which seem to work as expected when transplanted into normal mice. Now he is working on a second experiment. It is a significant test for the possibility of therapy, to perceive what happens when brown fat cells are implanted into obese mice.

Never downplay the importance of heart surgery as it happens to be crucial in the life of any concerned individual. It is a surgery on the heart and/or great vessels performed by a cardiac surgeon and is done in order to treat complications of ischemic heart disease (such as, coronary artery bypass grafting), correct congenital heart disease, or treat valvular heart disease created by various causes including endocarditis. It includes heart transplantation as well.

How is scenario of heart surgery faring then? As per doctors and also a score of researchers, quality of care has been improving since the first publication of mortality rates in cardiac surgery in 2001 and this has diminished the fear (of once) considerably. For this single reason people experiencing coronary artery bypass surgery, which accounts for about 60 per cent of all heart surgery in adults, are less expected to die.

There s no doubt that this is a great achievement and has emboldened the spirit of discouraged medical fraternity (of once). Speaking on this John Black, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, said: “All branches of surgery are following the trail on reporting outcomes that cardiac surgeons have blazed and this should spur those efforts on.” “All of medicine should take note of the findings that full audit has not resulted in risk-averse behavior.”

Take for instance the recently published report of Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery, contains comprehensive details of all NHS hospitals undertaking adult heart surgery in Britain. As per its findings, only in 2008, a section of all patients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery were over 75 – a rise of 10 per cent on the number in 1999.

Ben Bridgewater, author of the report and a consultant cardiac surgeon at the University Hospital of South Manchester, said: “One of the benefits we are now seeing from public reporting of outcomes is not just about bringing poor performers ‘into the pack’ but improving the performance of the pack as a whole.

It should be noted, as per recent estimations, the number of people over 80 having the surgery is also rising. This does make up 4.4 per cent of all patients undergoing this type of operation.