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Energy Expenditure Responses to Different Temperatures

NCT01568671 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 104

Last updated 2026-05-07

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Background:

\- The way that the body burns calories is known as energy expenditure. Some studies show that when we are cold, we burn more calories to keep our bodies warm. Brown fat is a special kind of fat that can use energy to keep the body warm. Small animals and infants have been known to have brown fat for many years. Recently, it has been suggested that adult humans also have brown fat. If brown fat becomes active (burns calories) in adult humans when exposed to cold, then these people would tend to burn off more calories and might not gain weight easily. Learning more about the relationship between energy expenditure, brown fat, environmental temperature, and body temperature may help explain why some people become obese and other people do not.

Objectives:

* To better understand how the body burns calories when exposed to different temperatures.
* To study brown fat and how it burns calories in cold temperatures.

Eligibility:

* Healthy men between 18 and 35 or 55 and 75 years of age.
* Healthy women between 18 and 35 years of age.
* To control for ethnicity, participants must be non-Hispanic whites or African Americans.

Design:

* Participants will be screened with a physical exam and medical history. Blood and urine samples will be collected.
* Participants will stay in the Metabolic Unit of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center as inpatients for no more than 14 days. The length of the hospital stay will depend on how participants respond to the different study temperatures.
* Every afternoon, participants will walk for 30 minutes on a treadmill. All meals will be provided.
* Participants will stay up to 5 hours per day in a specialized room with different temperature settings. Temperatures will range from about 61 degrees to 88 degrees Fahrenheit. Body temperature, activity, calorie burning, and cold/hot sensations will be monitored. On the study day of the coldest temperature, participants will have an imaging study to look for brown fat activity.
* Participants will be compensated for their time and participation at the end of the study.

Conditions

Interventions

OTHER

Room temperatures

Room temperature of metabolic chamber set between 16C and 31C

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)

    lead NIH

Principal Investigators

  • Kong Y Chen, Ph.D. · National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)

Study Design

Allocation
NON_RANDOMIZED
Purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE
Masking
SINGLE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Max Age
75 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2012-04-24
Primary Completion
2019-11-14
Completion
2019-11-14

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT01568671 on ClinicalTrials.gov