I want to study both subcutaneous and visceral adipose tissue in rats. Can I use epididymal fat pad as a visceral adipose tissue ??
Yes, the epididymal adipose fat pad is considered as part of the visceral fat.
As we know visceral fat is composed of several adipose depots, including mesenteric, epididymal and perirenal depots.
the colleagues already answered! It is also quite simple to isolate, so one more reason to use it.
Dear Prerna,
Visceral fat is composed of several adipose depots, including mesenteric, epididymal white adipose tissue (EWAT), and perirenal depots. Therefore, you can use epididymal fat pad as a visceral adipose tissue.
Best regards,
Kazemi
Dear Prerna
Yes, but please take into account that metabolic activity in the mouse epididymal adipose fat depends on the topological of the tissue.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0011525
Also check the other paper of Heterogeneity.
Although epididymal fat pad is indeed in the visceral cavity, there are two points to take into consideration.
1) While the weight of other visceral fat depots correlates (linear relationship) with the degree of obesity, the epididymal fat pad weight has a bell-shaped relationship to the degree of obesity (See fig 1E http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2793052/figure/F1/) . The reason for that is unclear.
2) Any conclusion on that fat pad may not be easily translatable to human (in which species this tissue is neither visceral nor quantitatively significant).
Thus, although epididymal fat pad is a very convenient tissue to work with, it is worth considering the above facts while designing the experiment.
I would consider it's anatomical localization, right next to the testes (male mice) thereby likely to be effected by local concentration of sex hormones (testosterone in the case of male mice). This may be very important in small mammals where fertility and health status may be tightly linked. Humans don't have such a fat depot.
