Sera of overweight people promote in vitro adipocyte differentiation of bone marrow stromal cells

INTRODUCTION: Overweight status should not be considered merely an aesthetic concern; rather, it can incur health risks since it may trigger a cascade of events that produce further fat tissue through altered levels of circulating signaling molecules. There have been few studies addressing the effect of overweight status on the physiological functions of stem cells, including mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which are the progenitors of adipocytes and osteocytes and are a subset of the bone marrow stromal cell population. METHODS: We decided to investigate the influence of overweight individuals’ sera on in vitro MSC proliferation and differentiation. RESULTS: We observed that in vitro incubation of bone marrow stromal cells with the sera of overweight individuals promotes the adipogenic differentiation of MSCs while partially impairing proper osteogenesis. CONCLUSIONS: These results, which represent a pilot study, might suggest that becoming overweight triggers further weight gains by promoting a bias in the differentiation potential of MSCs toward adipogenesis. The circulating factors involved in this phenomenon remain to be determined, since the great majority of the well known pro-inflammatory cytokines and adipocyte-secreted factors we investigated did not show relevant modifications in overweight serum samples compared with controls.