Implications of Pericardial, Visceral and Subcutaneous Adipose Tissue on Vascular Inflammation Measured Using 18FDG-PET/CT

OBJECTIVE: Pericardial adipose tissue (PAT) is associated with adverse cardiometabolic risk factors and cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, the relative implications of PAT, abdominal visceral and subcutaneous adipose tissue on vascular inflammation have not been explored. METHOD AND RESULTS: We compared the association of PAT, abdominal visceral fat area (VFA), and subcutaneous fat area (SFA) with vascular inflammation, represented as the target-to-background ratio (TBR), the blood-normalized standardized uptake value measured using 18F-Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography (18FDG-PET) in 93 men and women without diabetes or CVD. Age- and sex-adjusted correlation analysis showed that PAT, VFA, and SFA were positively associated with most cardiometabolic risk factors, including systolic blood pressure, LDL-cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose, insulin resistance and high sensitive C-reactive proteins (hsCRP), whereas they were negatively associated with HDL-cholesterol. In particular, the maximum TBR (maxTBR) values were positively correlated with PAT and VFA (r = 0.48 and r = 0.45, respectively; both P <0.001), whereas SFA showed a relatively weak positive relationship with maxTBR level (r = 0.31, P = 0.003). CONCLUSION: This study demonstrated that both PAT and VFA are significantly and similarly associated with vascular inflammation and various cardiometabolic risk profiles.