Pancreatic Fat Content and β-Cell Function in Men With and Without Type 2 Diabetes

Abstract

We thank Saisho, Butler, and Butler (1) for their interest in our study (2). They confirm and extend our findings by providing additional data on pancreatic fat content in individuals with and without type 2 diabetes using different technologies, i.e., computed tomography (CT) to measure pancreas volume and morphometric analyses of intrapancreatic fat spaces to estimate fat in postmortem pancreas sections (3). As repeatedly stated in our paper (2), proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) cannot discriminate between intracellular fat in adipocytes versus nonadipocytes. Similar to Saisho, Butler, and Butler, we reasoned that since islets constitute only ∼2% of the pancreas mass, the fat signal obtained by 1H-MRS …