Overview

• Norwegian investigators assessed PET/CT scans from 274 women with endometrial cancer, measuring glucose uptake in visceral fat as a marker of metabolic activity.
• Higher visceral fat metabolism was associated with advanced disease stage and the presence of lymph node metastases at diagnosis.
• Visceral fat volume showed no strong correlation with its metabolic activity, pointing to biological activity rather than quantity as the key signal.
• The findings were presented at the European Association of Nuclear Medicine’s annual congress (EANM’25) by lead author Jostein Sæterstøl.
• Researchers caution the approach is not ready for routine care due to low signal and measurement variability, with planned work on standardized analyses, AI-based segmentation, and biomarker and genomic correlations.