# Abdominal adipose tissue depots and cardiometabolic disease risk in postmenopausal women

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-IRVINE · 2020 · $248,259

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Accumulating basic, clinical, and population research suggests that high amounts of abdominal fat, particularly
visceral adipose tissue (VAT) in the intra-abdominal depot, plays a crucial role in the pathophysiology of
cardiometabolic diseases (i.e. type 2 diabetes (T2D), cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and stroke). This
research has elegantly described the intimate nature of VAT as a powerful metabolic driver of insulin
resistance, dyslipidemia, and hypertension. It also suggests that total body fat, and more specifically
subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT), may be relatively less important or even benign in the pathophysiology of
cardiometabolic disease. Despite this burgeoning framework of knowledge, much remains unknown about the
relationship between abdominal VAT and SAT levels with incident cardiometabolic disease events – a critical
gap in the evidence base since further insight resulting from research on this topic would have major
implications related to the importance of body composition and obesity in cardiometabolic disease prevention.
The central reason for the bottleneck in the evidence base has been feasibility. Researchers and clinicians
have had to rely on imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) to measure specific adipose tissue depots. Issues such as cost, radiation, and availability have made
these methods impractical in the clinic and for large research studies; and the few studies which have
incorporated these technologies may have limited sample size, or have not accrued enough follow up time and
events to adequately address the topic. However, there is an efficient and economical solution to this problem
via the application of new technology that quantifies abdominal VAT and SAT from existing Dual Energy X-Ray
Absorptiometry (DXA) scans. This technology has demonstrated strong validity with gold-standard measures of
abdominal adipose tissue depots from MRI and CT scans. Therefore, we propose to apply this novel
technology to the existing Women's Health Initiative (WHI) DXA cohort to quantify abdominal VAT and SAT
from existing DXA scans. This proposal will create a valuable, new, minority enriched, analytic longitudinal
cohort that will utilize repeated DXA measurements in the WHI at baseline (N=10,607), year 3 (N=8,939), year
6 (N=8,239), and year 9 (N=4,595) to address essential questions on the topic of abdominal adiposity/body
composition, and cardiometabolic disease risk in postmenopausal women as they age. This project capitalizes
on a rich scientific resource and will provide new and advanced results that will delineate the importance of
abdominal adipose tissue depots in cardiometabolic disease risk and the potential for targeted interventions
and prevention efforts.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9906162
- **Project number:** 5R01AG055018-04
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-IRVINE
- **Principal Investigator:** Andrew Owen Odegaard
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $248,259
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-06-15 → 2023-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9906162

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9906162, Abdominal adipose tissue depots and cardiometabolic disease risk in postmenopausal women (5R01AG055018-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9906162. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*