By Evangelia Bellas, PhD

As biomedical engineers, we are trained to employ our skill set to work towards solutions to help people. But often, we focus on the details of the problem, on the cells or the tissue, knowing that if successful, we could eventually help patients. When we share our research at conferences or through research articles, we interact with other researchers, and know their faces and names. But because we are biological engineers – and not clinicians – we don’t often meet the patients face-to-face that we are creating solutions for.

In my laboratory, the BellasFATLab, we focus on engineering adipose tissue. Adipose tissue is more commonly known as body fat. When people hear about our work, they tend to think of how they would like to get rid of their adipose tissue to lose weight easily and without much effort. Something that many of us would love a magic pill for! But until we get there, BellasFAT Lab engineers adipose tissue to develop 3-dimensional tissue models of obesity and metabolic (dys)function. This allows us to study fat cells and their surroundings (microenvironment) to learn how these change when going from a healthy to a diseased state. Then we look to uncover new therapeutic targets to hopefully get closer to that magic pill.

by Guy Eakin, PhD

Although we have much to learn about how a person’s genetic code can influence the probability that they will develop Lipedema, researchers generally believe that genes do play a role. It is not uncommon for women with Lipedema to be able to point to other members of their family who either had a Lipedema diagnosis or could be described as having similar body shapes. In fact, the earliest descriptions of Lipedema all point to the likelihood that the condition can be passed between generations [1–3].

In 1951, one seminal Lipedema study reported that 16% of women with Lipedema reported a “history of similar ‘large legs’ in female members of the family” [3]. In more recent studies, reports of a family history of Lipedema tend to be much higher, and consistently range from 64% to 89% [4–11], with some lower estimates ranging from 30% to 40% [12–16].

Two studies of women with Lipedema went further, characterizing family relationships that suggest women with Lipedema are most likely to have an affected mother (29-38%) followed by grandmother (17-35%), aunt (8-23%) and sister (5-14%) [11,17].

By Kathy Doherty

If you’re a member of the Lipedema Foundation community, you’re probably aware of the LF Registry, which we launched a couple of years ago. You might have already enrolled in it - and if so, we are very grateful for your participation!

But you may be wondering: What is a patient registry? Why should I get involved? And what do they do with the data they collect?

By Guy Eakin, PhD

For many years, an end-of-the-year review of Lipedema literature was a relatively simple exercise. Between 1950 and 2014, there was only one year when the field produced more than 10 papers in a single year. Fast forward to today where we celebrate 50 new publications since January 1, 2021. Remarkably, another metric is shifting as well. There was an almost 10% growth in the ratio of papers presenting new data to articles that summarize prior work (often for medical education, or to present new hypotheses).

Taken together, these numbers mean that half of the studies ever published in Lipedema research have emerged in only the last 3.5 years!

The focus of the Lipedema Foundation is, of course, on that data. We have funded about 20% of the work published in recent years and remain the world’s largest funder of Lipedema research. Our own scientific strategy is to create an environment conducive to effective clinical research. To do that, our attention is on three things – people, ideas to test, and measurements to make – each of which showed advancement this year as described below.