Morphological Comparison of the Stromal-Vascular Fraction of the Subcutaneous Fat Cell and Infrapatellar Fat Pad

Abstract

The use of regenerative technologies is widespread in modern medicine. Adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) in the stromalvascular fraction (SVF) appear to be most attractive for use in cell therapy. The objective of this study is to identify morphological differences in the stromal-vascular fraction from the subcutaneous tissue and infrapatelar fat pad (IFP). Material and methods. Data analysis of 15 patients was carried out. The average age of the patients was (44.0 ± 3.8) years with a body mass index of (20.1 ± 1.6) kg/m2 . Aspirates of subcutaneous adipose tissue were obtained from the anterior abdominal wall of 8 women without signs of obesity and comorbid metabolic diseases, as well as the resected IFP from 7 patients during therapeutic and diagnostic arthroscopy, also without signs of obesity. We conducted a comparative characterization of the composition of the obtained histological samples. Morphometric measurements of the diameter of adipocytes were performed. Parametric and non-parametric criteria of statistical analysis were applied. Parametric criteria were used to determine the average diameter of adipocytes and the standard deviation. Nonparametric ones were used to test the hypothesis about the normality of the distribution of the studied indicators according to the Shapiro–Wilk test. The results. SVF, which were obtained in our study from subcutaneous adipose tissue and from IFP, differ in composition, namely, the amount of the stromal component, which is visually much more pronounced in the SVF of IFP, the size of adipocytes, which in SVF from subcutaneous adipose tissue of a statistically larger diameter. Conclusions. It was morphologically proven that SVF of IFP is a promising source of adipose mesenchymal stem cells for regenerative medicine, especially for cartilage regeneration.