Nicotinamide Riboside Enhances In Vitro Beta-adrenergic Brown Adipose Tissue Activity in Humans

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of NAD+, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Because brown adipose tissue (BAT) is a major source of thermogenesis, the researchers hypothesize that NR stimulates BAT in mice and humans.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover study.

Because people in this NAD+ study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on NAD+, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with NAD+ could be set against what happens without it.

In the crossover set-up each of the participants took both NAD+ and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

In vitro primary adipocytes derived from human BAT biopsies were pretreated with 50 µM or 500 µM NR before measuring mitochondrial uncoupling.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Adipocytes, Adipose Tissue, Brown, Adrenergic Agents, Cells, Cultured, Energy Metabolism, Lipolysis and Mice.

Author keywords: NR, brown adipose tissue and mitochondria.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of NAD+.

Its findings take up roughly 6 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2021 (The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism), a journal based in United States.

More context: the NAD+ compound page, all human trials.